Major issues for development environments are version management and scalability support. In this contribution, we discuss design guidelines for building a scalable, Topic Maps based prototype for software development process support, based on our work in. Particular attention is paid to the versioning of both Topic Map Templates, i.e., patterns used for making multiple copies of a set of topic map objects, and their instances.

In combination with faceted classification of the resulting hierarchical structures and a generic meta process model, it is shown that the intrinsic traits of Topic Maps can be used to reduce the complexity of the management of large topic maps, e.g., by filtering.