"topic maps are arousing much interest in the internet community, for reasons that include the following:

• extended linking and infoglut
• topics are better finding aids than strings
• topic maps will promote a new generation of search engines

people are not interested solely in hits on particular terms used to identify topics, nor solely in statistics about the past behaviors of people who appeared (to a computer) to be interested in similar topics, nor solely even in subsets of worldwide information that have already been indexed by particular information vendors or portal operators." (source: topic maps go xml)

linking requirements and hytime: "a link may not only 'get me from here to there', it may indicate a crucial dependency between two elements, for example, a diagnosis of a problem and its suggested repair procedure. When one of these elements changes, the other must be examined to see if it is still relevant and current."