Conceptual browsing
A concept browser is a new kind of knowledge management tool that is designed to support the exploration and presentation of information that is structured in the form of a knowledge manifold. A concept browser conforms to the eight major design principles listed below:
- Separate the content of a concept or a concept-relation from its contexts. This supports the reuse of conceptual content across different contexts.
- Describe each separate context in terms of a context map, preferably expressed in the Unified Language Modeling technique, described above
- Allow neighborhood-based contextual navigation on each concept and concept-relation by enabling the direct switch from its presently displayed context into any one of its contextual neighborhoods.
- Assign an appropriate set of resources as the content components of each appropriate concept and/or concept-relation.
- Label each resource (concept, concept relation, context or content component) by making use of a standardized data description (= meta-data) scheme.
- Allow meta-data based filtering of the content components through context-dependent aspect-filters. This enables the presentation of content in a way that depends on the context.
- Allow the transformation of a content component, which is also a context map, into a context (called contextualization).
- Support lateral thinking by introducing a concept bookmaker, which allows concepts as well as contexts to be interactively constructed from content according to a menu of different content-gathering principles.
For a more detailed discussion of the merits of these principles, see background.
During the last 3 years the KMR-group at CID has developed a first prototype of concept browser called Conzilla. It has proved to be useful within a multitude of different knowledge domains, including e-learning, e-commerce and e-administration, and the KMR-group is presently participating in a number of national- and international collaborations within all of these fields. For more information on these projects, see our section on collaborative projects.
Introductions
Demos
- Conzilla Presentation of Interactive Learning Environments [Flash]
- Conzilla - Växten och marken [Flash]
Papers
Current activities
- Conzilla is our conceptual browsing platform.
Links
Contact: Ambjörn Naeve