This paper describes some of the basic steps in applying topic maps in a real world application, a topic map-driven web portal of conference papers. It covers the tasks of collecting and examining source data, defining an ontology and populating a topic map. It discusses tools for automatically creating topic maps, with particular emphasis on how the synergies between topic maps and RDF can be exploited in the process of autogenerating topic maps from structured and semi-structured source data. It also provides an introduction to the concept of published subjects, describes how they are being applied in this project and details the benefits that they are expected to bring in both this and other projects.