Combining Concept Mapping with CBR: Towards Experience-Based Support for Knowledge Modeling

Knowledge management depends on effective methods for capturing knowledge in useful forms and making it available when needed. Electronic concept maps provide a promising representation for knowledge models that can be developed directly by the experts themselves, but the flexibility of concept mapping raises questions of how to support the knowledge modeling process and to standardize its results, in order to facilitate future examination and reuse. We describe ongoing research on the use of case-based reasoning methods to support the knowledge modeling process through proactive retrieval of relevant prior concept maps, in order to provide suggestions to aid the concept map generation process. The selection of relevant concept maps relies on an algorithm that combines textual and topological analysis. We describe the algorithm and present an example that illustrates concept suggestion procedures in the Mars exploration domain.