Maps and geographic information systems (GISystems) both encode spatial relationships in structured formal representations. These representations enable shared understanding of geographic phenomena and their interdependencies. This formal encoding makes maps and GIS well suited inherently to facilitating collaboration among human participants in thinking and decision making about the geographic...

In this study I examine the value of concept maps as instruments for assessment of conceptual understanding, using the maps to compare the knowledge of function that students enrolled in university calculus classes hold. Twenty-eight students, half from nontraditional sections and half from traditional sections, participated in the study. Eight professors with PhDs in mathematics also completed...

Semantic maps are usually assumed to describe a universal arrangement of different conceptual situations in a speaker's mind as determined by perceived relations of similarity between these conceptual situations. This paper provides a number of arguments that challenge this view, based on various types of evidence from processes of semantic change and synchronic implicational universals. The mu...

Conceptual graphs are a good choice for constructing and exploiting a knowledge base. In several of our projects (semantic portal for e-tourism, exploitation of digital object corpus, etc.), we have to query such bases. So it is natural to consider queries and bases as simple graphs and to compute the set of all projections from a query to a base. However, there is a problem of the return of th...

A new approach has been introduced to construct deformation-mechanism maps for metals and solid solution alloys. For this purpose two computer programs named DEFOR and GRAPH have been written in BASIC to be run on IBM compatible personal computers. Using these programs, deformation - mechanism maps for a number of pure metals and a solid solution alloy (Ti-6wt% Al) have been plotted and effects...

Both Topic Maps and RDF are popular semantic web standards designed for machine processing of web documents. Since these representations were originally created for different purposes, they have conceptual differences in their data models, and therefore have different tools to parse, store, and query them. However, there are more tools to handle RDF data than those existing for Topic Maps. Our ...

Ontologies are a form of knowledge representation that is meant for software systems, or agents, as well as for human users. Building an ontology consists of, in short, formally specifying concepts and their relations concerning a certain knowledge domain. Such specification should convey an interpretation of the domain as agreed by experts and requires specific ontology engineering skills. In ...

The main objective of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the of Business Process Modelling field focusing on the definition of the Inter-Organizational Business Processes from both a high-level modelling perspective and a technological one. We used a conceptual maps' approach in order to clarify all the fundamental concepts that surround these two fields. We will present the tw...