Create custom sidebars with taxonomies

Hi guys, I’ve searched the forums and codex but can’t find exactly what I am looking for, and honestly I am not sure where to start. More than anything, if anyone wants to point me in a direction where I can learn the relevant concepts that would apply to my question please feel free.

Anyway, the site I am designing is heavily resource oriented and I would like to create sidebars based upon these resources and their taxonomies. For instance, the taxonomies are divided up as such (this is just an example):

1. CATEGORIES (articles, audio, video, etc)
2. TOPICS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.)
3. TAGS (WP themes, WP plugins, Joomla Themes, etc.)

Now, each CATEGORY will include each TOPIC. And each TOPIC will include some TAGS as its children.

So here is what I want to do first. I would like to create an accordion sidebar that lists the TOPICS which TAGS as their children. It would be structured like this:

TOPICS    <– sidebar title
Wordpress    <– topic
   WP Themes    <– tag
   WP Plugins    <– tag
Joomla       <– topic
   Joomla Themes <– tag

I have created a custom hierarchical taxonomy name “topics”, but am not sure if this is the best way to go about it to accomplish what I am looking for. After I learn how to do this, I then hope to make additional sidebars that will be filtered according to each category. Hopefully that was clear.