Topic maps have figured very prominently at all recent IDEAlliance conferences, with a large number of interesting presentations on various aspects of the topic map paradigm. However, at every conference there are always many people who are encountering topic maps for the first time. For those people, experiencing that something they have never heard of before is the "buzz of the conference" can be very frustrating.

This presentation is designed to cater to the needs of such people by providing an introduction to the basic concepts of topic maps in a lively and informal manner. The presentation has been given many times before, and always to great acclaim. Most recently it served to demystify topic maps at Extreme Markup 2001 and XML 2001.