The authors discuss the educational and research benefits of applying an innovative technology—topic maps—for organizing and retrieving online information in the context of web-based courseware. Topic maps offer a standards-based approach to encoding expert’s domain and instructional knowledge, that is, to building educational ontologies and courseware components. This allows further reuse, sharing, and interoperability of knowledge structures and teaching units between courseware authors and developers. The authors also present current work on developing, evaluating, and utilizing topic maps-based courseware modules.