Knowledge Maps, visualizing conceptual relationships, representing and diagramming complexity

24 June 2002
Some weekend thinking, coming out of the Bieber, Engelbart et al. 2002 article Toward virtual community knowledge evolution. Not wishing to reinvent the wheel, I started looking for utilities to do what I was imagining, and found some things that I've encountered before in various connections, including

• IHMC Concept Map Tools: Getting Started with Concept Mapping and beta download (c:\cmaptool --there's also a server, to allow sharing of concept maps). Tutorial, discussion threads

• The Concept Mapping Homepage [1997 --mostly dead links]

• CYC and OpenCyc

The case I'm imagining is my Anthropology of East Asia course, though an asynchronous discussion among Brazil Consortium participants might be imagined with equal ease. The toolkit I'm imagining as a facilitator for visualizing a subject would allow the user to

• draw shapes (rectangles, hexagons, ellipses, circles...) and
• SIZE them;
• to LINK them with lines;
• to locate points (NODES: stars, triangles, asterisks...) within the frame containing shapes and lines, and
• link points too.

Thus, shapes for 'politics' and 'art' might intersect within the shape representing China, and there might be links to persons (the painter who was criticized for the image of the winking owl, Madame Mao) and topics (iconography of Chairman Mao, bibliography of socialist realism in the arts) and places (images of specific instances of 'political art', perhaps accessible via maps of distribution of same). Hyperlinks might connect to files (like bibliography), but might as well initiate SQL queries to databases. The point of all this is to have a way to represent an organization of a complex domain of knowledge, which can be shared and augmented/edited.

Wonder if KartOO's capability of grouping things by degree of overlap, and/or XML and harvesting, have anything to do with this?

Ontology is what this is really all about ('an ontology is a specification of a conceptualization', 'the theory of objects and their ties'):

• The Ontology Page

• Descriptive and Formal Ontology (Raul Corazzon)

• Semantic Web Research Community Ontology

• John Sowa --see Guided Tour of Ontology, Conceptual Graphs and his book Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations

  the study of the categories of things that exist or may exist in some domain. The product of such a study, called an ontology, is a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domain of interest D from the perspective of a person who uses a language L for the purpose of talking about D. The types in the ontology represent the predicates, word senses, or concept and relation types of the language L when used to discuss topics in the domain D. An uninterpreted logic, such as predicate calculus, conceptual graphs, or KIF, is ontologically neutral. It imposes no constraints on the subject matter or the way the subject may be characterized. By itself, logic says nothing about anything, but the combination of logic with an ontology provides a language that can express relationships about the entities in the domain of interest.

• INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FORMAL ONTOLOGY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS (ACM, 2001) and Proceedings

• Ontology-Based Metadata from U Mich

• ScholOnto: An Ontology-Based Digital Library Server for Research Documents and Discourse

• Structuring Discourse for Collective Interpretation (Shum 2000 [original at CiteSeer, with links] --see also Knowledge Media Institute) and Issues as Elements of Information Systems July 1970 Werner Kunz and Horst W. J. Rittel [according to Shum, "...a seminal paper in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) as well as management and policy science. In it Kunz and Rittel give a brief description of Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS), which is the foundation for much of the modern work on dialog support and argumentation mapping tools."])

• Building the Infrastructures of Distributed Collective Practices (Open Conference on Collective Cognition and Memory Practices, September 19-20, 2000)

It's regrettable that we missed ACM's Hypertext 2002, in Maryland in mid-June. A lot going on there that's relevant to what we're doing. Here's some stuff that exemplifies:

WebDAV and DeltaV: The Writeable, Collaborative, Versionable Web

Jim Whitehead

Description

At present, the Web is primarily a read-only medium, providing excellent support for browsing content, and limited support for authoring new content. WebDAV is a standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for extending the Web with collaborative authoring capability, and is supported by such industry-leading tools as Office 2000/XP, Photoshop 6, Illustrator 10, GoLive 5/6, Internet Explorer 5, Mac OS X, Apache, Internet Information Services 5/6, Oracle iFS, and Jigsaw, along with Web storage sites such as My Docs Online, and Sharemation. Building on this strong base of support, the DeltaV protocol adds versioning and configuration management capabilities to WebDAV servers. With DeltaV, it is possible to record the revision history of Web resources, work on collections of resources in isolation from other collaborators (workspaces), and create consistent configurations of these resources.

This tutorial gives an overview of the WebDAV Distributed Authoring protocol (RFC 2518), and the DeltaV protocol for Web Versioning and Configuration Management protocol (RFC 3253). This is a novice-to-intermediate level tutorial, which assumes some knowledge about the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), although a brief overview of this protocol will be given during the course.

Using the WebDAV and DeltaV protocols, existing HTML authoring applications, as well as more traditional word processing, spreadsheet, and image manipulation applications can support remote collaborative authoring and versioning. WebDAV-enabled applications can save directly to the web, and allow seamless transitions from individual to collaborative work. So, using a WebDAV-enabled word processor, you can begin work on a document, then later realize you need to add several co-authors. After saving your document to the web, and emailing the URL to your collaborators, you can all begin to collaboratively work on the document in-place on the web.

Building upon its current strong base of supporting tools, in the next 1-2 years WebDAV is expected to be broadly adopted by content authoring tools. This will bring the benefits of the writeable Web to millions of users, opening significant opportunities for Internet Service Providers, Web storage sites, document management, content authoring tools, protocol developers, and researchers. Furthermore, Web write-enabling existing applications is just the first phase of WebDAV adoption. DeltaV will allow the Web to be used as the core infrastructure for remote software development, especially Open Source, replacing the remote CVS protocol. With its automatic versioning capabilities, DeltaV also allows existing WebDAV authoring tools to take advantage of versioning-capable servers.

WebDAV/DeltaV is one of the most substantial, yet under-hyped changes to the core architecture of the Web. By attending this tutorial, you will develop a deep understanding of the capabilities and potential of this increasingly important standard.

Presenter biography

Jim Whitehead is the Chair and Founder of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group on Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), and is a co-author on all major specifications produced by this working group. Jim additionally spearheaded the formation of the DeltaV working group for Web versioning and configuration management, and is an author on the DeltaV protocol specification. Jim has led several student teams developing prototype WebDAV implementations, including the WebDAV Explorer client, and a database-backed repository for Apache mod_dav.

Jim is also an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests include hypertext versioning, collaborative authoring, web protocols, open hypermedia (the Chimera system), and configuration management.. Jim has a Ph.D and MS in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine (Ph.D. dissertation: "An Analysis of the Hypertext Versioning Domain"), and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Spatial Hypertext and Information Analysis

Frank Shipman

Description

Over the last decade, spatial hypertext has emerged as a vibrant area of research with an emphasis on how people collect, organize, annotate, and interpret information. This tutorial will describe:

the emergence of spatial hypertext from navigational hypertext, design trade-offs in creating spatial hypertext systems, a variety of spatial hypertext systems and applications, and research issues in spatial hypertext.

Information analysis, as the driving application of early spatial hypertext systems, will be discussed in detail. Example tasks will include collecting information from a variety of sources, evaluating the veracity and significance of information, expressing multiple interrelationships between information chunks, and organizing a presentation of this information for others.

This tutorial is aimed at hypertext researchers and writers who want to know more about spatial hypertext and its use, analysts looking for tools to aid in the collection and organization of information, and designers of systems that include visual/spatial expression.

Participants will receive a copy (CD-ROM) of the Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB), a spatial hypertext system you can use for information analysis and many other tasks.

Presenter biography

Frank Shipman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. He has been pursuing research in the areas of hypermedia, computer-supported cooperative work, and intelligent user interfaces since 1987. Frank was one of the original authors on the VIKI project and is currently the principal investigator on the Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB) project. He is the author or co-author of numerous important papers in spatial hypertext, one of which received the Engelbart best paper award at Hypertext 99. He manages on-going research projects in the areas of spatial hypertext, information visualization, requirements gathering, and computers and education.

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2002 will be in Portland 14-18 July. The tutorials are toothsome. Why didn't we know about this?