The topic is the hash of an event function signature.
Example
curl -X POST --data '{
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"method": "eth_newFilter",
"params": [
{
"topics": [
"0x56b138798bd325f6cc79f626c4644aa2fd6703ecb0ab0fb168f883caed75bf32"
]
}
],
"id": 1
}' http://localhost:8545 | jq .
This filter will collect data about a specific event. To calculate the topic's hash run web3.sha3('TestEvent(string,uint256)') in a geth console. web3.sha3 will return a hash calculated using the Keccak-256 SHA3 algorithm.