  The description of baryons as soliton solutions of effective meson theories
for three flavor (up, down, strange) degrees of freedom is reviewed and the
phenomenological implications are illuminated. In the collective approach the
soliton configuration is equipped with baryon quantum numbers by canonical
quantization of the coordinates describing the flavor orientation. The baryon
spectrum resulting from exact diagonalization of the collective Hamiltonian is
discussed. The prediction of static properties such as the baryon magnetic
moments and the Cabibbo matrix elements for semi--leptonic hyperon decays are
explored with regard to the influence of flavor symmetry breaking. In
particular, the role of strange degrees of freedom in the nucleon is
investigated for both the vector and axial--vector current matrix elements. The
latter are discussed extensively within in the context of the {\it proton spin
puzzle}. The influence of flavor symmetry breaking on the shape of the soliton
is examined and observed to cause significant deviations from flavor covariant
predictions on the baryon magnetic moments. Short range effects are
incorporated by a chiral invariant inclusion of vector meson fields. These
extensions are necessary to properly describe the singlet axial--vector current
and the neutron proton mass difference. The effects of the vector meson
excitations on baryon properties are also considered. The bound state
description of hyperons and its generalization to baryons containing a heavy
quark are illustrated. In the case of the Skyrme model a comparison is
performed between the collective quantization scheme and bound state approach.
Finally, the Nambu--Jona--Lasinio model is employed to demonstrate that
hyperons can be described as solitons in a microscopic theory of the quark
