The Knowledge Management Research Group

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:

  1. Separate the content of a concept or a concept-relation from its contexts. This supports the reuse of conceptual content across different contexts.
  2. Describe each separate context in terms of a context map, preferably expressed in the Unified Language Modeling technique, described above
  3. 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.
  4. Assign an appropriate set of resources as the content components of each appropriate concept and/or concept-relation.
  5. Label each resource (concept, concept relation, context or content component) by making use of a standardized data description (= meta-data) scheme.
  6. 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.
  7. Allow the transformation of a content component, which is also a context map, into a context (called contextualization).
  8. 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.




Current activities

  • Conzilla is our conceptual browsing platform.


Contact: Ambjörn Naeve

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