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If the subject is the heart of what we're talking about, instead of some particular name for a subject, then the names of subjects become no more or less privileged than any other things we may know about subjects. Here we have a reifier for the Statue of Liberty, and it is shown here as having at least three different properties that can be used to identify its subject. It could have lots more, in different languages. And it could even have non-naming ways of identifying it -- we could identify it as the thing that occupies certain ranges of geographic coordinates, for example.

A reifier for the Statue of Liberty.

We can attach knowledge about subjects to reifiers of those subjects. Anybody can create a reifier. Any human expression, and any data, can be viewed in terms of reifiers. Reifiers can be read and written. They can have locations; they can have addresses. They can be implemented as database records, XML elements, in-memory objects, etc.

(The Topic Maps Reference Model is implementation-neutral.)