Concept Browsing

April 25, 2008 in Collaborative Tagging, Knowledge Management, Metadata, Ontology, RDFA, Semantic Web, Taxonomy, metalogging

Conzilla2 – our second generation concept browser – is a knowledge management tool with many purposes. Among other things, it aims to be

• an efficient collaborative knowledge environment / modeling tool.
• a versatile interface for editing and styling RDF.

Conzilla presents knowledge in terms of specific maps, Context-maps. A Context-map displays nodes and arcs, from now on referred to as concepts and concept-relations, with specific box-forms, icons, arrow-heads, linestyles etc. To get an idea look at the screenshots below, click on them for full scale versions:

Startmap – examplifies different types of concepts in a single context-map

The start map in edit mode

Conzilla2 features

• Conzilla2 supports an open ended set of different diagram types. Per default the UML class, activity, Use-case, and process diagrams are provided.
• Each concept and concept-relation has a ‘life of its own’. This means that the same concept and concept-relation can occur in different maps, which is in accordance with the knowledge manifold information topology. It is also possible to provide a simple hyperlink from each concept or concept-relation to another context-map.
• Context-maps, concepts, and concept-relations can be endowed with metadata.
• Concepts or concept-relation can be filled with content components in the form of links to other resources, e.g. webpages or books in a library, persons etc.
• A context-map, a concept or a concept-relation can be distributed, allowing people to extend them easily. In this case they must be loaded from different sources. Each of these sources we refer to as a Knowledge Patch.
• A Knowledge Manifold typically contains a set of Context-maps and has a responsible publisher which we call a knowledge gardener.
• The apperance in Conzilla2 is controlled by stylesheets.
• Everything is stored in RDF allowing integration with other tools.
• Conzilla2 includes an editor for Context-maps.
• Since Conzilla 2.1 context-maps can be published easily to an information directory: Collaborilla.
• Published maps can be loaded by everyone who has access to Collaborilla (which means literally everyone, since this access is not restricted).
• Everyone can comment on or contribute to published maps.

http://www.conzilla.org/wiki/Overview/Main