Before he joined STEP he was head of the Document Computing department at ZGDV (Computer Graphics Center, Darmstadt, Germany). Hans Holger studied computer science and graduated with the doctoral thesis "Literate Specifying of Hypermedia Documents". All in all he has more than ten years experience in information process re-engineering gained from various projects with publishing houses, aircraft industry, and telecommunication industry. He is a frequent speaker and trainer at international SGML/XML events. Since 1998 he represents Germany in ISO/JTC1/SC34-the ISO committee standardizing SGML, HyTime, DSSSL, and Topic Maps.

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The new ISO standard ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps defines a model and architecture for the semantic structuring of link networks. Dubbed the 'GPS of the information universe', topic maps will become the solution for organizing and navigating large and continuously growing information pools, and provide a 'bridge' between the domains of knowledge representation and information management. This paper presents several technical issues of which are of great interest when applying topic maps to real world applications. The main focus of the paper is the introduction of 'topic map templates' -a semi-official term coined by the standards' committee for a concept that the author argues is a necessary but as yet unstandardized addition to the basic model. Furthermore association taxonomies, class hierarchies, and consistency constraints of topic maps are presented and discussed.

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