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Concept maps popped onto the radar last week when an article in Wired highlighted a concept mapping tool called Cmap. Cmap is one of a variety of concept mapping tools that’s in use in schools and other educational settings to teach children to model the structure and relationships connecting – well – concepts.
The root idea of using concept mapping in educational settings is to move away from static models of knowledge, and toward dynamic models of relationships between concepts that allow new kinds of reasoning, understanding, and knowledge. That sounds a lot like the purpose of OWL.
It might be a stretch to say that by advocating concept maps, schools are in fact training kids to create ontologies as a basic learning and teaching method, and a vehicle for communicating complex ideas – but it’s a very interesting stretch all the same. As Information Architects, we’re familiar with the ways that structured visualizations of interconnected things – pages, topics, functions, etc. – communicate complex notions quickly and more effectively than words. But most of the rest of the world doesn’t think and communicate this way – or at least isn’t consciously aware that it does.
It seems reasonable that kids who learn to think in terms of concept maps from an early age might start using them to directly communicate their understandings of all kinds of things throughout life. It might be a great way to communicate the complex thoughts and ideas at play when answering a simple question like “What do you think about the war in Iraq?”
Author Nancy Kress explores this excact idea in the science fiction novel ‘Beggars In Spain’, calling the constructions “thought strings”. In Kress’ book, thought strings are the preferred method of communcation for extremely intelligent genetically engineered children, who have in effect moved to realms of cognitive complexity that exceed the structural capacity of ordinary languages. As Kress describes them, the density and multidimensional nature of thought strings makes it much easier to share nuanced understandings of extremely complex domains, ideas, and situations in a compact way.
I’ve only read the first novel in the trilogy, so I can’t speak to how Kress develops the idea of thought strings, but there’s a clear connection between the construct she defines and the concept map as laid out by Novak, who says, “it is best to construct concept maps with reference to some particular question we seek to answer or some situation or event that we are trying to understand”.
Excerpts from the Wired article:
“Concept maps can be used to assess student knowledge, encourage thinking and problem solving instead of rote learning, organize information for writing projects and help teachers write new curricula. “
“We need to move education from a memorizing system and repetitive system to a dynamic system,” said Gaspar Tarte, who is spearheading education reform in Panama as the country’s secretary of governmental innovation.”
“We would like to use tools and a methodology that helps children construct knowledge,” Tarte said. “Concept maps was the best tool that we found.”

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Below is an excerpt from an email sent to all employees – a ‘global broadcast’, very Max Headroom… – of a larger company (name removed), in response to repeated plees to improve the nightmarish user experience of the time and expense system that all employees must use.
<begin transmission>
There have been a few issues with the submitting and/or processing of Expense Reports resulting from individuals using data fields which have no value to [company], but may have processing impacts within the system. At this time, there is no way to remove or ‘grey-out’ these unused fields. If you have not been trained on the use of a field and/or do not know what the field may/may not do, don’t enter any data within that field – ask your branch admin or contact the help desk.
</end transmission>
What a fantastic example of a user experience directly impacting business: useless but open entry fields = garbage data = inaccurate financials!
Let’s peak into the inner chambers, to see how this might play out:
CEO> “How are we doing this week for revenue?”
CFO> “No idea. I don’t have any numbers to work with.”
CEO> “Why not? That’s ten weeks in a row!”
COO> “Another financials system crash.”
CTO> “Some junior tech in nowheresville accidentally hit the drop select of death again, and now we can’t get reports done for that half of the country.”
CEO> “The analysts and the board are going to kill me – someone take care of this right now.”
COO> “Fix it, or get rid of it!”
CTO> “We can’t fix it – we didn’t buy the configuration module. And we cut the deployment services contract from 24 weeks to 6 weeks, so there was no time to figure out which fields we needed from the generic installation…”

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Thursday night I was at Casablanca in Harvard Square for an information architecture meet and greet after Lou’s Enterprise IA seminar. I ordered a Wolver’s. It was dim and noisy, so after shouting three times and pointing, I ended up with a Wolaver’s…
Not a surprise, right? My first thought was “What’s in my glass?” My second thought – I was surrounded by information architects – was about the semantic angle on the situation. It seems like a fair mistake to make in a loud and crowded bar. But as someone who works there, he should know the environmental context, the ways it affects fundamental tasks like talking and answering questions, and about any alternatives to what he thought I said that are close enough to be easily mistaken. Before I get too far, I’ll point out that I liked the mistake enough to order another.
Setting aside for a moment the notion of a semantically adept agent system that monitors interactions between bartenders and patrons to prevent mistakes like this, let’s look at something more likely, such as how does Google fair with this situation? Some post-socialization research shows that as far as Google is concerned, all roads do in fact lead to Wolaver’s. Even when Google’s results list begins with a link to a page on Wolver’s Ale from the originating brewery, it still suggests that you might want ‘wolaver’s ale’. Maybe this explains the bartender’s mistake.
Here’s the breakdown: Google US suggests “wolaver’s ale” when you search for “wolvers ale” and “wolver’s ale”, but not the other way around. When you search for “Wolavers”, Google suggests the correctly punctuated “Wolaver’s”. You can get to the American ale, but not the British.
More surprising, it’s the same from Google UK, when searching only British pages. (Someone tell me how pages become part of the UK? Maybe when they’re sent off to full-time boarding school?)
Google’s insistence on taking me from wherever I start to “Wolaver’s Ale” comes from more than simple American brew chauvanism. This is what happens when the wrong factors drive decisions about the meanings of things; it’s these basic decisions about semantics that determine whether or not a thing correctly meet the needs of the people looking for answers to a question.
You might say semantic misalignment (or whatever we choose to call this condition) is fine, since Google’s business is aimed at doing something else, but I can’t imagine that business leaderhsip and staff at Wolver’s would be too happy to see Google directing traffic away from them by suggesting that people didn’t want to find them in the first place. Neither Wolver’s nor Wolavers seems to have Google ads running for their names, but what if they did? By now we’re all familar with the fact that googling ‘miserable failure‘ returns a link to the White House web site. This reflects a popularly defined association rich in cultural significance, but that isn’t going to satisfy a paying customer who is losing business because a semantically unaware system works against them.
This a good example of a situation in which intelligent disambiguation based on relationships and inferencing within a defined context has direct business ramifications.
Here’s a preview of the full size table that shows the results of checking some variants of wolvers / wolavers:

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Prompted by curiousity, and a desire to see if interactive art really is irritating, I took in several exhibits for the 2005 Boston CyberArts Festival, at the Decordova Museum this weekend.
Sarah Boxer’s review of Trains – a landscape made of tiny model railroad buildings and figures, adorned with movie images from famous movie scenes, and populated by passengers that appear only on the video screen of a Gameboy – offers several stellar insights about the emotionally unhealthy states of mind brought on by attempting to interact with computerized interfaces. Boxer says:

Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art (prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima’s “Trains,” at the DeCordova Museum School Gallery, in the Boston suburb Lincoln, which is a model train set guided by cellphone.

It’s clear from this that the emotional or other content of the art installation itself was obscured by the user experience Boxer had to negotiate in order to engage with the piece. Boxer’s expectations for user experience quality might have been lower if she were trying out a new spreadsheet, or Lotus Notes, but that’s just an example of how the software industry has trained customers to expect abusively bad experiences. See photos of Trains here.
One of the more usable – if that judgement applies – is Nam June Paik’s “Requiem for the 20th Century“. Requiem – photo here – according to Boxer is less annoying “…a relief to just stand there and watch the apocalyptic montage! No interaction. No instruction. No insults.”
Once past the interface, I found Requiem elegiac as expected, but unsatisfying for two reasons: first by virtue of concerning mostly Paik’s work in video art, and second by being strangely empty at heart (or was that the point?). The svelte physicality of the Chrysler Airstream art-deco automobile contrasted sharply with the ephemeral nature of the video images showing on it’s windows, in a clear example of concepts that were well-thought-through, but in the end, this is another example of art (post modern and/or otherwise) that is clever, yet incapable of engaging and establishing emotional resonance. “Requiem” is not even effectively psychological, which would broaden it’s potential modes of address. To ameliorate this weakness, I recommend obtaining the audiobook version of J.G. Ballard’s “Crash“, and listening to it’s auto-erotic on headphones while taking in the silvered spectacle.
From the description: “Requiem sums up the twentieth century as a period of transformative socio-cultural change from an industrial based society to an electronic information based society. The automobile and the television figure as both the most significant inventions of the century as well as the most prominent signifiers of Western consumerism.”

The most interesting installation was a wiki based soundscape, the first example I know of in which information architecture becomes both medium and art.
From the official description of the festival:

The creative connection between two of Boston’s most vital forces – the arts community and the high-tech industry – is once again in the spotlight, with more than 70 exhibitions and events in and around the Boston area from April 22 through May 8. It’s the first and largest collaboration of artists working in new technologies in all media in North America, encompassing visual art, dance, music, electronic literature, web art, and public art.

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