CPE/CSC 581-S07 Usability and Knowledge Management Assignment 3: Knowledge Visualization

While most knowledge is probably represented and communicated via text and natural language, it is frequently advantageous to present knowledge visually. Many tools for knowledge management are either explicitly designed with a strong emphasis on visualization (e.g. Concept Maps, Mind Maps), or at least provide support for the visual presentation of knowledge (e.g. through graphs, trees, fish-eye views, or other techniques).

Your task in this homework is to explore at least two different visualization techniques with the body of knowledge that you assembled in the previous assignment as test domain. You can either use the whole collection, or concentrate on a subset that is more suitable. The two techniques should be reasonably different, and not just two variations of the same underlying principle.

Here is a list of methods and tools that have been used for similar purposes:

• Tree and Graph Displays for Ontologies
• Concept Maps
• Mind Maps
• WikiWebs
• Fish-Eye Views

Grading Guidelines

This paper contributes up to 25 points to the overall assignments score. The score will be determined by the following criteria:

• scope of the presented domain knowledge (breadth and depth of the body of knowledge)
• complexity of the selected domain, (is the collected knowledge fairly easy to capture and present, or more difficult)
• body of knowledge framework (how difficult is it for others to augment the collection of knowledge)
• quality of the visualization (do the selected techniques emphasize relevant aspects; is the knowledge well organized and easy to follow)
• evaluation of the visualization techniques used (identification of strenghts and weaknesses; overall suitability for the task)
• presentation (is the appearence of the material of professional quality, e.g. without spelling or grammatical errors)

For a high score, your evaluation should comprise at least two diagrams for each visualization technique used, and contain a discussion and evaluation of the approaches.

If you are representing the knowledge in a format that does not lend itself to the use of tools for visualization, you can also use a drawing program or pencil and paper to illustrate the visualization techniques.

Submission

The deadline for this assignment is two weeks after the distribution. It should be submitted via the Blackboard "Discussion Forum" feature; I will set up a discussion forum for it. You should format your document as an HTML file so that it can be viewed easily from within BlackBoard. If you use MS Word or a similar program, please save it as HTML.