![]() In this way they may share and publish their concept maps on the Internet, link resources, and search the World Wide Web for information related to the map. Participating individuals can be in the same room or anywhere in the world since the maps can be built synchronously or asynchronously, thus allowing users to collaborate at distance. Also, it has been useful in challenging students to collaborate in the construction of a collective concept map, thus enabling the visualization of the changes during the progress of their work. I have used this software in conjunction with a datashow in lectures as a diagnostic tool to measure learners’ previous knowledge structures. There is a tutorial page that can help users to start their navigation in the software. This software is user-friendly, and enables users to create maps that can link resources to specific concepts through a simple drag-and drop operation, such as text, PowerPoint presentations, photos, videos, graphs, websites, and even other concept maps. This cartography of hierarchical statements allows better communication between experts and learners. In fact, this software demands linking words, thus enabling the construction of propositions that form meaningful statements called semantic units. It allows the construction of concept maps within an Ausubel-Novak cognitive-constructivism framework, where individuals create knowledge by linking new concepts to prior knowledge. Among the many software programs that fulfill the task of constructing digital concept maps, the CmapTools software is one that is available free at and was developed by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). The relationships between concepts are called cross-links.Ĭomputer software programs for concept mapping are better than the “paper and post-it” approach because they allow the user to readily rearrange concepts and linking statements to restructure the map. In concept mapping, one identifies the important concepts from subject matter and describes the relationship between those concepts with linking words. It acts as a tool for meaningful learning by presenting information using a hierarchical tree-like branching structure illustrating the holistic relatedness of ideas. We demonstrate this argument with a set of smart tools that have been implemented in the CmapTools software kit.A concept map is represented by a visual-spatial network of propositions that represent knowledge structure. Our claim is that the compromise in the formalism in lieu of flexibility proposed by concept maps can be compensated, with the help of AI and smart tools, to help bring the best of both worlds to knowledge elicitation and representation. ![]() In this paper we propose that despite the free-style format that concept maps can take, specific characteristics of well-constructed concept maps (structure, semantics, context, etc.) provide an abundance of information on which to develop smart tools that aid the user in the process of constructing concept maps. However, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community frowns on the use of the term "knowledge representation" to refer to concept maps, because they cannot be readily translated to a formal representation for inference or other AI techniques. As such, it can be considered a knowledge representation scheme. Public CmapServers have resulted in a large collection of knowledge models publicly available, constructed by users of all ages in a variety of domains of knowledge and from a large number of countries.Ĭoncept maps are a graphical representation of a person's (or group of persons') understanding of a domain. The collaboration features enable remote users to asynchronously and/or synchronously collaborate in the construction of concept maps, and promote comments, criticism, and peer review. The client-server architecture of CmapTools allows easy publishing of the knowledge models in concept map servers (CmapServers), and enables concept maps to be linked to related concept maps and to other types of media (e.g., images, videos, web pages, etc.) in other servers. It is available for free for educational and not-for-profit organizations, and public servers have been established to promote the sharing of knowledge. CmapTools is a software environment developed at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) that empowers users, individually or collaboratively, to represent their knowledge using concept maps, to share them with peers and colleagues, and to publish them. Technology can further help by making it easy to construct and modify that representation, to manage large representations for complex domains, and to allow groups of people to share in the construction of the concept maps. Concept maps are an effective way of representing a person’s understanding of a domain of knowledge. ![]()
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