🔖Knowledge Representation: Knowledge Maps (Part II - Knowledge Mapping)

It’s natural to talk about K-maps within Knowledge Representation, and extensively within Knowledge Management, domains in which the process of creating a K-map is known as Knowledge Mapping, shortly K-mapping. In essence that’s what K-mapping is about, creating a K-map, however in literature could be found more elaborated definitions. According to D. Hyerle, K-mapping is “a rich synthesis of thinking processes, mental strategies, techniques and technologies, and knowledge that enables humans to investigate unknowns, show patterns of information, and then use the map to express, build, and assess new knowledge” [1]. 

Within the same context but from a slightly different perspective, [3] regards it as a “consciously designed communication medium using graphical presentation of text, stories, models, numbers or abstract symbols between map makers and map users”. In the context of K-mapping in organizations, B. Bergeron defines it as the “process of identifying who knows what, how the information is stored in the organization, where it’s stored, and how the stores of information are interrelated” [2]. All the above definitions focus on mapping as a process, knowledge as the object of the mapping process and the context in which it occurs.

The use of various types of K-maps introduces similar concepts, K-mapping being referred as concept mapping when talking about concept maps or when the granularity of a map is at concept level, mind mapping when the focus is Mind Maps or externalization of mental maps, semantic mapping when discussing about semantic maps, process mapping in the case of process maps, etc. Related concepts stress other aspects of K-mapping referring to different levels of abstraction, for example ontology creation or ontology engineering, in this context ontology mapping referring to the mapping between different ontologies. Same happens in the world of the databases in which data modeling or semantic modeling refers at the creation of a data model, while data mapping refers at the mapping between two structures.

As stressed before, the various types of K-maps in use introduce their own creational philosophy, which with a little effort could be raised at the state of methodology. K-mapping as a process could be reduced to input, output and what happens in between. As input for a K-map could be used the various types of media content, mental models, knowledge of experts, discussions outcomes or any other sources of information. As knowledge is not always available at our disposal, searching for knowledge, identifying knowledge is quite a time consuming task, especially when knowledge is not indexed, easily accessible or we don’t exactly know what we are searching for. In general we talk about knowledge acquisition, which refers to the process of extracting knowledge, structuring and organization of knowledge. 

When creating a K-map we are doing extensively knowledge acquisition, essential in the process of learning. In exchange, when we create K-maps on the mental models, we are externalizing our knowledge, transforming the tacit in explicit knowledge, figuring out or better said evaluating what we stored in our brain, grounding of knowledge by finding meanings, formalizing concepts, finding the best formulation, finding new associations, building on previous knowledge, examine beliefs, integrating, mixing and recombining knowledge, identify patterns in knowledge, patterns of thinking, becoming creative, etc. Also these aspects are part of K-mapping, even if they are not so visible in the process, however they are stressed especially during K-mapping. 

The structuring and organization of knowledge in K- mapping is done in representational form (visualization), translated into spatial organization or simple aggregation of information, in patterns or models of expressions, and here the various types of K-maps are used as a form of expression. Mapping techniques need to be flexible in order to reflect the representational richness of knowledge, they evolve with experience, “the one who maps” learning with time to take advantage of the appropriate type of K-map or pattern. K-mapping is thus an iterative process, a K-map being evolved during several stages, the final outcome being unexpectedly different than the inputs or expected outcomes.

K-mapping applies to individuals as well as to groups, collaborative or coordinative K-maps involving more complex forms of acquisition, process or visualization, often being involved some forms of negotiation and knowledge sharing from which the output emerges. Collaborative K-mapping seems to be preponderant to the contexts in which the force of the group emerges, mainly economical and scholar organizations, and recently social networks.

References:
[1] M. Jafari, P. Akhavan, A. Bourouni, R. H. Amiri, (2009). A Framework For The Selection Of Knowledge Mapping Techniques. Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, Vol. 10, No. 1, [Online] Available from: http://www.tlainc.com/articl180.htm (Accessed:16 October 2010)
[2] B. Bergeron. (2003). Essentials of Knowledge Management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 0-471-28113-1.
[3] H. P. Tseng, Y-C. Lin (2008) A Knowledge Management Portal System for Construction Projects Using Knowledge Map. Knowledge Management:
Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications, M.E. Jennex (Ed.). ISBN-13: 978-1-59904-934-2.

🔖Knowledge Representation: Knowledge Maps (Part I - An Introduction)

Most of us are familiar with the geographic Maps, during school hours or outdoor trips we had at least once the possibility of guiding ourselves using a Map. Paraphrasing Alfred Korzybski, “the map is not the territory”, though a Map offers a bird’s eye view of the territory, it might be not perfect, nor so detailed as we would like it to be, though it allows people identifying their position, their destination, their route left behind and the one ahead, the obstacles, the boundaries, the known and unknown zones. Our marvelous memory allows us storing details of such Maps, more or less perfect copies of the Maps, voluntarily or involuntarily memorized. 

Even more, we are creating in our brain an adaptable dynamic Mental Map of the world we live in, reflecting the changes occurred in it the way we perceive them. It is what Robinson, quoted by [1] calls it “reduction of reality” and “construction of an analogical space”, the complex structure of reality being reduced to an easy to memorize Map attempting to be a reflection of reality. A geographic Map uses Names, color, spatial organization, and a small set of symbols in order to represent a projection of the geographical world we live in. In a similar manner we could map also the various types of knowledge using a similar set of tools known as Knowledge Maps or simply K-maps.

Especially between students, could be met the practice of underlining or marking a chunk of text with special marker(s), highlighting the respective text as important, at least for a second review. The chunk of text could be a concept, a definition or a whole paragraph, and that’s actually the input for a K-map. In theory you could put the whole chunks of texts together on post-it or electronic documents, group them together in some way, and there you have a rudimentary K-map. Thus could be intuited that a K-map is a graphic organizer of chunks of texts identified as information or knowledge. Putting together row text allows structuring the content based on identified associations, it could be sequential structure, logical implication, importance, topic, etc. 

Thus are created implied or explicit association between the various chunks of text. Further value could be added by breaking the text in smaller chunks, summarize a chunk in fewer words, replace words with more meaningful words, add numbering, symbols, other types of markings (e.g. NB = “nota bene”, QED = quod erat demonstrandum), references, questions, etc. Of course, the same could be done in the book itself though ignoring the fact that book’s owner or further readers could argue such methods, the value comes from having the chunks of text coming from different books in one place or, if you want, in fewer text containers, and the electronic documents make this approach such an easy task.

From a visual perspective, processing a whole chunk of text could be time consuming, especially when we look for specific information, typically key words, primary concepts, definitions, etc. Marking such text in special ways brings some additional value, though the linear character of text makes it still difficult to process. What if we break the text at conceptual level? Wouldn’t such output be easier to process? Now it depends also on each person’s capabilities, though working with concepts seems closer to the mental structure of our mind, in the way meaning is represented and created. 

What if we further represent the associations between concepts explicitly, giving them names, and thus associating other concepts with them? Wouldn’t be such structures easier to process and understand? Such structures would be also K-maps, though their content is more refined. Actually the concept-based and whole propositions could be mixed together in K-maps, the degree of refinement of such concepts being more a figure of taste or, as will be further seen, of philosophy.

Until now we considered a K-map as being an aggregation of chunks of text of various granularities, implied or explicit associations, and the later could be labeled using other more or less standardized concepts. We talked also about formatting, meaningful display, resources, symbols and other types of markings. These are in fact the content elements of a K-map, but in definitive what is a K-map?!

Extrapolating the above considerations, a Knowledge Map or K-map could be considered as a visual graphical tool used to aggregate and represent information or knowledge. The definition seems to need further refinement because the graphical character implies a visual component, representation could involve aggregation and thus the later term could be abandoned, while following the DIKW pyramid, knowledge involve information. Graphical is the form of representation, while the role of visual is to represent explicitly the channel of communication, in fact stressing its visual, respectively graphical character, a K-map could be considered as synonym to visual aid or graphical organizer, terms more frequent used, especially in teaching. No matter of the degree of knowledge encompassed, a representation of the knowledge is not the knowledge itself, it resumes thus to information that triggers knowledge and the associations existing between information. Thus, a K-map could be defined as a visual graphical tool used to represent information and the associations existing between them, either implicit or explicit. The term information encompasses here any type of symbols or chunk of texts. When information is present in its most granular form, at concept level, the K-map is a visual graphical tool used to represent concepts and the associations existing between them.

The definition of a K-map represent the “what” from the W5H1 syntagm, how about the why, who, when, how, by whom and by what means? Why a K-map, isn’t the text or what we know enough? Do we really have to break the knowledge into such maps? Maybe we don’t, it depends on each persons capacities, some of us have a really good memory, retain everything they read and recalled it any time. For others, such capabilities come with some effort, spending some time in memorizing the information we consider as useful for the future, and also this step depends on each person’s capabilities and skills. As mentioned in introduction, the read material could be “formatted”, broken into pieces, annotated, summarized, restructured in order to increase the efficiency of memorization and recall. 

According to researchers, in brain itself takes place some unconscious restructuring of information, associations are created, strengthened and removed, the later activity resulting in forgetting the information once stored, the recovery of such information necessitating a review of the source or sources used in the first place to acquire the respective information. Considering the huge amount of information our brain deals with, it’s almost impossible to identify during a simple read, all the connections existing between the various concepts assimilated, especially when they aren’t so evident. This perspective of what’s happening in our brain is quite simplistic, though can be discovered already some gaps in the learning process, gaps which in theory could be addressed with the help of K-maps. As its name and definition denote, a K-map has the function of a map, used to represent knowledge. 

Once such a map created, it would be easier for us to access it, and thus to refresh our information, eventually use it as a reference to the actual text. In addition, when evaluating the associations of such a map, existing or inexistent, we could identify new associations, conditions under which they hold (e.g. range of applicability, exceptions), new concepts, new contexts, etc. Let’s not forget that the human is a social being, the meaning of the concepts we deal with relying also their meaning at macro level – organizations, communities of practice, friends or any other types of groups. The individual maps could be used in order to compare and evaluate knowledge, collective collaborative and coordinative creation of K-maps coming with their benefits too. They could be used as a baseline for learning, negotiation, documentation or (self-) evaluation. 

The creation of a K-map requires additional time, time we don’t always have. Does it really make sense to create such a map all the times? It’s probably recommended to create it when we acquire new knowledge, especially when we want to identify the concepts on which the respective chunk of knowledge is built upon. Once the backbone concepts mastered, the necessity of a map decreases to some degree, in the end its necessity depending on individual needs. A K-map could be useful also when externalizing the knowledge, especially the tacit knowledge, in organizations being quite a valuable tool in documenting the various types of information organization work with, process maps, flow maps, value stream maps, being several examples of such K-maps.

How to create a K-map? In definitive maybe we create such maps without knowing it, it’s built in our “ADN” as we often arrive to express complex thoughts by externalize them in diagrammatic form. There are more than 50 types of K-maps available in the literature: Concept Maps, Semantic Nets, Conceptual Graphs, Mind Maps, and so on. They have many similarities, often the similarities residing in the philosophies used to create them. Adhering to one or more of such maps is a question of need, preferences, habitude and requirement. Sometimes also deviations from the philosophy behind a map could prove to be useful as long satisfies a purpose, same as a map arrives to be misused, for example by placing too much content, be it irrelevant or relevant, or of using too much formatting, not respecting guidelines, etc. There are several requirements a K-map should satisfy – it should be simple to use and navigate, with an approachable level of complexity and thus understandability, adaptive and dynamic.

 “By what means” could refer here to the tools used to create K-maps and the channels used to distribute them. Again it’s a question of need, preferences, habitude and requirements. In the past years appear many tools used for the creation of K-maps, having multiple features, but still lacking in representational content the human mind is used to. The paper and a crayon could prove efficient as well, while those with an exceptional memory could create such maps directly in the inner mental world. Everything is possible, everything it’s a question of practice and self-improvement of techniques.

References:
[1] Hyerle, D. 2008. Thinking Maps®: A Visual Language for Learning. In: Thinking Maps®: A Visual Language for Learning, ISBN: 978-1-84800-149-7. [Online] Available from: http://www.springerlink.com/content/x57121720731381j/ (Accessed: 23 June 2009)

🔖Knowledge Representation: Knowledge Maps (Part VII: Knowledge Mapping in Action)

Sometimes in order to easier/better understand a text, be it a chapter from a book or an article, online or offline source, I prefer to highlight the most meaningful concepts (the primary concepts) related to the topic(s) the text is approaching, and bring the concepts together in a digital knowledge map. It depends on the text material, sometimes when the subject is too vast and too many concepts are introduced, I prefer to consider the concepts and the relations between them, while other times, when the author tries to treat a topic from various angles I prefer to use techniques like 5W1H and its variations, typically trying to answer to the following questions: who, what, why, where, when, how, in what way and by what means. 

In between the identified concepts it might happen to add other concepts that come into my mind or combine two or more sources on the same topic. Thus it happens to arrive to a map like the below one, draw using CMapTools and based initially on an article on Project Management written by C. Roan. The map isn’t by far perfect, this being just its current state, in time following to add more concepts as I get deeper in the subject or new associations are triggered.

The labels I used to represent the concepts might not be the same as the ones used in the source, mainly because I prefer to use the labels that allow me trigger easier memories, sometimes trying to identify a concept that could replace or stand for a whole sentence. The target is actually to find the concept with the smallest unit of meaning that reflects what is said in the text from my perception. I even might choose to represent concepts that have similar meaning, or general and particular meaning with respect to the same scale of meaning, for example the “email” and “voicemail” could be regarded as a “messaging system” but given its importance I feel they need to be shown separately; actually I could have grouped the “email” and “voicemail” as a subgroup of “messaging system”, as I did in case of the “project drivers” case, and usually I prefer to do that, though it depends also on map’s focus, on whether I intent to highlight only the primary concepts or to built the whole range of associations.

There should be a methodology for creating such maps, actually almost each type of map used (e.g. Concept Maps, Mind Maps) come with their own philosophies/methodologies, though the human nature in general and the learning process in particular should not be necessarily bound by that, being important to have the flexibility of representing concepts with the labels we consider as appropriate, alternate representation techniques or unit of meaning.

Once the map is built it helps to read again the text but this time from the perspective of the map, most probably that this step would help you to find new meaning, conceptual differences and approaches, helping to ground the new knowledge. Each time I’m reviewing such a map, I remember sections from the text, associations, how I arrived to the given associations, in the end each concept in the map is telling a story of its own. In parallel with the source texts and their associated maps, is built also an alternative map, the itinerary and evolution of acquired knowledge and its implication with respect to further knowledge acquisition, retention, retrieval or reuse. In addition this process helps to make the hidden existing knowledge explicit, to ground knowledge into existing structures and derive new meaning and possible areas of exploration.

Each concept from such a map could be taken separately and create a similar map for it, eventually create a map for each of the concepts from the respective maps, and repeat the process over and over again, this allowing to built the whole picture. That’s quite an endeavor, isn’t it? Many of such maps will have common concepts or when put together there could be added other associations. Putting all these maps together is not an easy task, and I feel that more has to be done from this perspective, because are needed powerful tools that allow users to represent knowledge in various forms and patterns, navigate inside of a map or between maps, share the map with others, collaborate, do comparisons and assessments, validate input from a semantical point of view because multiple labels (e.g. synonym family, acronyms) could be used for the same concepts.

 Such a map could be used to share knowledge, as starting point for other types of explorations, for example the above map could be used to discuss the issues related to communication, each such concepts coming with its own causes, some of them could have even common root causes, so it would be helpful to identify such situations in order to understand the complexity of causation.

It helps creating such a map also before writing an article, because the map allows identifying the overall coverage of the article, the topics that remain to be approached, the conceptual intersection between the articles. Such a map or text’s projection in such a map could be used as navigation tool for the text, much like book’s indexes but in a hierarchical manner, the association between concepts allowing, at least from my point of view, an easier and better coverage of the text than indexes. Of course, there are still steps to be done in order to directly integrate the text with the built map in order to facilitate text’s navigation, though many of the applications that allow rendering text have built-in search capabilities that could be used by the users to identify the actual location of the concept. On the other side the fact the existence of multiple labels for naming the same concept could raise several problems that could be in theory solved by using powerful semantic search.