Supporting Knowledge Capture, Construction, and Sharing

David Leake
Indiana University
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~leake

Concept maps capture knowledge about the concepts and concept relationships in a domain, using a two-dimensional visually-based representation. Computer tools for concept mapping empower novices and experts to directly construct, navigate, share, and criticize rich knowledge models. This talk describes ongoing research on augmenting concept mapping tools with systems to support the user's knowledge construction process by proactively suggesting relevant concepts and associated resources (e.g., images, video, and text pages) during concept map creation. Providing such support requires efficient and effective algorithms for judging concept similarity and the relevance of prior concepts to new concept maps. We discuss key issues for such algorithms and present initial approaches to estimating similarity and relevance of new information. We close by discussing their tradeoffs and new research challenges.