The Ozone back-end supports to means of connection: local and remote.

In a local connection, the Ozone server is run in-process with the TM4J application and access the database directoty. In this case, there is no need to start an Ozone database server process. However, you should note that it is not possible for two clients to simultaneously make a local connection to the same database.

A remote connection uses a TCP/IP protocol between the TM4J application (the client) and the Ozone database server. In this case, you must start the Ozone database server as described in the section called “Running The Ozone Database Server”. A single Ozone database server can support mutiple simultaneous connections from different client applications.

The type of connection and the database to be connected to are all specified in the connection URL passed to the Ozone back-end in the property named 'dburl'. The format of this property is described in the section called “Configuration of the Ozone Topic Map Provider”.