The interest in Topic Maps becomes bigger and bigger. Many IDEAlliance conferences - XML USA, XML Europe, Knowledge Technologies, and Extreme Markup Languages - dedicated several presentations or tracks to this new ISO standard for knowledge representation. But most of these presentations were technical and were not focusing on the user's perspective. This Town Hall Meeting puts the users and their requirements into the center. It wants to provide answers to the user's question "What can Topic Maps do for me?". The experts' panel will cover representatives from standard committees (ISO,

OASIS), software vendors, open source developers, consultants, and - most important - Topic Map users already gained experience with this exciting technology.

The session itself will be organized as follows: After brief introduction of the experts some pre-pared questions will be answered by the panelists before open Q&A session with the audience starts.

Prepared questions will be: Which are the three key benefits and three most important applications of topic maps? What are the biggest fears/concerns when introducing topic maps? Why using topic maps and not relational databases? When to use topic maps and when to use RDF? What tools are available? Who makes already use of topic maps? How do topic maps fit into content management and knowledge management solutions? Are there requirements not fulfilled by the available standards and tools? Having discussed these questions the audience is ready to query issues of their interest. Moderator will motivate audience by asking who thinks already about using topic maps for which purpose/application (panelists give hints how to approach a topic map project), who has non-technical questions, what would be your key requirements to be fulfilled by topic maps, and that like.

Moderator will ensure that meeting will be kept on a non-technical level.