This paper makes a brief review for the development of domestic and international topic maps, focusing on the relative results of the application research of topic maps, including thesaurus improvement and knowledge base construction, knowledge organization and retrieval, knowledge construction, web portal navigation and knowledge navigation, semantic web application and disciplines management. We point out that there exists some problems in domestic research, such as systematic, large scale study has not been formed, the research method are single, the scope and filed of topic map application...
