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I've been asked to provide a few words about Topic Maps and include some references. So lets start with the references and move on from there. The inventors of XTM, topicmaps.org. That's the best starting point IMO.

What are topic maps? Well, essentially, imagine a repository of Topics which have relationships to other Topics. The type of each relationship is a Topic in itself.

Each Topic is a semantic meaning of something.. a Concept if you will.

Each Topic can then have occurrences of that topic. An occurrence provides a URL or content that is an occurrence of the topic it is attached to.

Beyond those basics, you begin to build on the concept of an ontology. An ontology is a set of words that describe a domain. Basically, the ontology will be the Topic's that described the types of relationships between Topics. For example, a 'sibling' is part of an ontology describing praternal relationships.

Some basic types of relationships are 'instanceOf', 'childOf' and 'parentOf' .. from there, you build your own, such as 'relatedTo' or 'ownerOf' and 'ownedBy', etc.

Okay, now we add some rules for merging topic maps together in a consistent and reliable way (read the XTM specification) and we can start sharing topic maps around the internet.

Slap a shmick query interface on the front of your topic maps server and you can start querying up information about topics people are browsing. In fact, you can have all access to a website through the topic map, picking an occurrence to show them information.

Obviously, there is more to be said about this. There are books you can buy, websites you can read, large ontology mapping groups spending millions figuring out the best way to describe nearly extinct african species of plant, etc, etc..

Hope that's not too rough an introduction to the world of topic maps :)