Knowledge management has become the hot new buzzword. Standards such as topic maps and Resource Description Framework (RDF) have been created to allow knowledge to be managed and interchanged. In all the hype surrounding topic maps, one of the oft- mentioned applications is the ability to create community-defined taxonomies and ontologies. Taxonomy is a fancy word meaning, “the ordering of things into groups or categories.” Ontology is a description of a set of concepts and the relationships that can exist between those concepts. Topic maps provide much of what is needed to define a fairly robust taxonomy. However, there are still capabilities that are necessary to build robust ontologies that are not part of the topic map standard.