From the website:
The Lord of the Rings project is a project and initiative started by Emil Johansson. It is an attempt to place every character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional universe in a family tree. With time, the project will expand to include other things.
I mention this as an example of a project that could profit from the use of topic maps technology but also to illustrate that it is possible to obtain world wide news coverage (CNN) with just a bit of imagination.