As its name suggests, the Hypertopic model was designed to overcome the limits of Topic Maps. It allows to express different viewpoints on shared items, along with consensual attributes.

Hypertopic was first implemented in a Web application called "Agorae" and used by communities involved in managing catalogues. A qualitative document analysis application called "Porphyry" had a similar multi-viewpoint model. Comparing their features helped in defining a core protocol, now adopted by other software (Argos, Cassandre, LaSuli, Steatite).

The resulting social semantic Web infrastructure is used for:

• Cooperative cataloguing,
• Qualitative analysis of images,
• Qualitative analysis of texts.