CMAPTOOLS: A KNOWLEDGE MODELING AND SHARING ENVIRONMENT

Concept mapping is a process of meaning-making. It contains a list of concepts (events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label ) and organizing it in a graphical representation where pairs of concepts and linking phrases.

CmapTools (http://cmap.ihmc.us/) is a software kit developed at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) which is used to:

i) Construct Concept Maps.

ii) Capabilities of annotation of of the maps with additional material such as images, diagrams, video clips and other such resources.

iii) It provides the capability to store and access concept maps on multiple servers to support knowledge sharing across geographically-distant sites.

The CMap tools have two concepts:

a) The use of concept mapping for knowledge elicitation ( a toolkit for knowledge acquisition)

b) The use of collaboration and sharing the knowledge among the participants.

The objectivies of CMap tools are:

i) CMap tool having user friendly interface and anyone can make a verity of concepts maps.

ii) CMap enable users to graphically express their understanding of a domain of knowledge.

iii) CMap provides the collaborative learning environments in order to share the knowledge of all ages.

iv) CmapTools was designed based on a modular architecture, in which components can be added or removed as needed from a Core module.

The CMap tool contains the very powerful distributed peer to peer features of collaboration of files, documents and knowledge. This tool automatically find new places in the network and also provides the public places where user can his knowledge models.

There are two types of collaboration types on designing the maps.

i) asynchronous collaboration (don’t need to be working on the maps at the same time)

ii) synchronous collaboration (two or more users are working on the maps at the same time)

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