Many sites are largely organized around topics (as opposed to, say, the org chart or products). But there are plenty of nuances to having successful topics pages, from dealing with political issues (when should a new topic page be created) to functionality options (how should topics pages be managed) to the metadata concerns. If creating automated listings on topics pages, consider this:
You can only have automatically-pulled topics listings if there is a one-to-one or many-to-one relationship from your source metadata tags to your target groupings.
This probably sounds a bit too academic, so let's look at this in concrete terms. Let's consider the case where you have a bunch of articles tagged to either broccoli, apple, or orange. If you wanted to have a vegetable topic page and a fruit topic page, then this would work fine. This is because you have a one-to-one mapping from broccoli to vegetable (broccoli is always a vegetable), and a many-to-one mapping of apple and orange to fruit (both apple and orange always map to fruit and nothing else). That said, you cannot have red and green topic pages based on the existing tagging. Broccoli is always green, so if the only tags you had were to broccoli then you would be fine. But the apple tagging is the problem: an apple can be either green or red. Obviously, you could introduce a new color tag, but if you had a large number of existing pieces of content then you would have a large amount of retagging to do.
This may be obvious when looking at three tags and a handful of possible topics pages. But when looking at larger repositories and the possibility of creating topic pages with some automated pulls, consider the mappings to ensure you end up with relevant topics pages.
