NTCIR (NII Test Collection for IR Systems) Project focuses on information retrieval tasks in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, English and cross-lingual information retrieval.
From the project description:
For the laboratory-typed testing, we have placed emphasis on (1) information retrieval (IR) with Japanese or other Asian languages and (2) cross-lingual information retrieval. For the challenging issues, (3) shift from document retrieval to “information” retrieval and technologies to utilizing information in the documents, and (4) investigation for realistic evaluation, including evaluation methods for summarization, multigrade relevance judgments and single-numbered averageable measures for such judgments, evaluation methods suitable for retrieval and processing of particular document-genre and its usage of the user group of the genre and so on.
I know there are active topic map communities in both Japan and Korea. Perhaps this is a place to meet researchers working on issues closely similar to those in topic maps and to discuss the contribution that topic maps have to offer.