Utilizing Mind-Maps for Information Retrieval and User Modelling

Mind-maps have been widely neglected by the information retrieval (IR) community. However, there are an estimated two million active mind-map users, who create 5 million mind-maps every year, of which a total of 300,000 is publicly available. We believe this to be a rich source for information retrieval applications, and present eight ideas on how mind-maps could be utilized by them. For instance, mind-maps could be utilized to generate user models for recommender systems or expert search, or to calculate relatedness of web-pages that are linked in mind-maps. We evaluated the feasibility of the eight ideas, based on estimates of the number of available mind-maps, an analysis of the content of mind-maps, and an evaluation of the users’ acceptance of the ideas. We concluded that user modelling is the most promising application with respect to mind-maps. A user modelling prototype – a recommender system for the users of our mind-mapping software Docear – was implemented, and evaluated. Depending on the applied user modelling approaches, the effectiveness, i.e. click-through rate on recommendations, varied between 0.28% and 6.24%. This indicates that mind-map based user modelling is promising, but not trivial, and that further research is required to increase effectiveness.