Can you explain what the term 'topic' means in the context of Kafka and how it is used to organize data?

In Apache Kafka, the term "topic" refers to a logical category or stream of messages where producers publish data and consumers read from.

Each topic is divided into multiple partitions, which allows scaling processing and storage. Messages within a topic are ordered by partitions and have offsets that help consumers track what they have already read.

Using topics helps organize data by theme or event type, such as "orders", "payments", or "user-activity". This simplifies routing and processing of messages in distributed systems.