“Knowledge management” is of course one of today's buzzwords and a term that often involves not a little marketing hype. For the big consulting companies, knowledge management is essentially about new business management techniques designed to address the fact that people (and the expertise they possess) are the primary assets in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Others equate knowledge management with information management (especially some vendors of information management tools, who are only too happy to slap a new label on their boxes). But knowledge is fundamentally different from information: the difference is that between knowing a thing versus simply having information about it. And if, as one writer claims ([Ruggles 1997]), “knowledge management covers three main knowledge activities: generation, codification, and transfer”, then topic maps can be regarded as the standard for codification that is the necessary prerequisite for the development of tools that assist in the generation and transfer of knowledge.