Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2010) are available.
If you are interested in the next generation of assistive tools for authoring topic maps or using them before your competition does, it would be hard to find a better starting place.
One of my interests is in text archives, so interactive construction of a topic map with an application that searches an archive for subjects or relationships for subjects would be cool. Perhaps that “learns” your preferences as you accept or reject its suggestions. And that “knows” what others have found building topic maps for the same archive. You can follow or not follow their paths into the archive.