Web-Based Representation and Visualization of Analogies

Humans use analogies to communicate, reason, and learn. But while the human brain excels at creating and understanding analogies, it does not easily recall useful analogies created or learned over time. General purpose tools and methods are needed that assist humans in representing, storing, and recalling useful analogies. Additionally, such tools must take advantage of the World Wide Web's ubiquity, global reach, and universal standards. We first identify commonly occurring patterns of analogy structure. Because understanding of instructional analogies is significantly improved when their structure is visualized, we develop a compact and general representation for analogies using XML, and demonstrate general methods for visualizing the structure of analogy expressions in Web-based environments.