• networked abstraction of something which contains any number of map objects

    [ actually not only maps can be stored: ontologies, queries, ...]

  • each is addressable within a (hierarchical) namespace

    / is the root (of the good)

    /markup/

    /markup/xml/

  • individual topics in these maps can be addressed via

    /markup/xml/xpath

    /internet/web/firefox

  • abstracted

    how it is implemented is hidden

    can be implemented as SQL database, in memory only, tuple-stores, ....

  • networked

    TM store runs on different machine than the web application

    TM store can be distributed itself (farming out on clusters)