Conceptual Similarity and Conceptual Mapping

I came across a relatively old paper authored by researchers at Indiana University and Institute for Human and Machine Cognition: Assessing Conceptual Similarity to Support Concept Mapping

Indeed, it seems like a great concept.

The abstract reads:

“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 experts to directly construct, navigate, share, and criticize rich knowledge models. This paper describes ongoing research on augmenting concept mapping tools with systems to support the user 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 four new approaches developed for assessing conceptual similarity for concepts in concept maps. Two use precomputed summaries of structural and correlational information to determine the relevance of stored concepts to selected concepts in a new concept map, and two use information about the context in which the selected concept appears. We close by discussing their tradeoffs and their relationships to research in areas such as information retrieval and analogical reasoning.”

The conclusion states:

“Concept mapping provides a means to capture and examine human concepts, as well as a tool for aiding experts and novices at constructing and refining their own understanding of a domain. Augmenting concept mapping tools with intelligent methods for suggesting relevant concepts to compare and consider is promising for aiding these processes and facilitating knowledge sharing. Developing these methods depends on being able to efficiently and effectively assess the relevance of concepts in prior maps to selected concepts in the concept maps currently being constructed.”

The article points one to downloading their tools. However, this document states the following:

“In January of 2007, IHMC selected Ceryph as the exclusive licensing agent of CmapTools programs. Free use by commercial and not-for-profit users is no longer available. There is currently available two commercial versions of CmapTools.”

I was planning in reviewing a copy, but after that I stopped reading the marketing lines that followed.