As Topic Maps allow a structural representation of knowledge, this structure often needs to be visually presented to end-users. Issues, often contradictory, such as representation and navigation requirements, arise.

TopiMaker addresses most of these issues by putting the Topic Map as a graph on a 2D ground plane in an interactive 3D world. Topics can be elevated to planes that are parallel to the ground plane. This results in some unique qualities. Furthermore, the notion of ghost topics is introduced to alleviate information overload and occlusion problems. A separate
window exploits tree-like features of certain association types. Features such as filtering, searching, selecting, modifying, importing, exporting, merging, querying and constraining the Topic Map are integrated with this visualization technique to make of TopiMaker a novel Topic Map authoring environment.