Applied Concept Mapping

The expanding application of Concept Mapping includes its role in knowledge elicitation, institutional memory preservation, and ideation. With the advent of the CmapTools knowledge modeling software kit, Concept Mapping is being applied with increased frequency and success to address a variety of problems in the workplace. Supported by business application case studies, Applied Concept Mapping: Capturing, Analyzing, and Organizing Knowledge offers an accessible introduction to the theory, methods, and application of Concept Mapping in business and government. The case studies illustrate applications across a range of industries—including engineering, product development, defense, and healthcare. The authors provide access to a free download of CmapTools, courtesy of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, to enable readers to create and share their own Concept Maps. Offering examples from the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, Brazil, Scotland, and The Netherlands, they highlight a global perspective of this dynamic tool. The text is organized into three sections: Practitioners’ Views—supplies narratives, guidance, and reviews of applications from career Concept Mappers Recent Case Studies and Results—presents in-depth examinations of specific applications and their results Pushing the Boundaries—explores what’s possible and where the boundary conditions lie Applied Concept Mapping facilitates the fundamental understanding needed to harness the power of Concept Mapping to develop viable solutions to a virtually unlimited number of real-world problems.

This is a complete guide to the concept mapping methodology and strategies behind using it for a broad range of social scientists - including students, researchers and practitioners.

The expanding application of Concept Mapping includes its role in knowledge elicitation, institutional memory preservation, and ideation. With the advent of the CmapTools knowledge modeling software kit, Concept Mapping is being applied with increased frequency and success to address a variety of problems in the workplace. Supported by business application case studies, Applied Concept Mapping: Capturing, Analyzing, and Organizing Knowledge offers an accessible introduction to the theory, methods, and application of Concept Mapping in business and government. The case studies illustrate applications across a range of industries—including engineering, product development, defense, and healthcare. The authors provide access to a free download of CmapTools, courtesy of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, to enable readers to create and share their own Concept Maps. Offering examples from the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, Brazil, Scotland, and The Netherlands, they highlight a global perspective of this dynamic tool. The text is organized into three sections: Practitioners’ Views—supplies narratives, guidance, and reviews of applications from career Concept Mappers Recent Case Studies and Results—presents in-depth examinations of specific applications and their results Pushing the Boundaries—explores what’s possible and where the boundary conditions lie Applied Concept Mapping facilitates the fundamental understanding needed to harness the power of Concept Mapping to develop viable solutions to a virtually unlimited number of real-world problems.

​This book undertakes to marry the concepts of "Concept Mapping" with a "Design Thinking" approach in the context of business analysis. While in the past a lot of attention has been paid to the business process side, this book now focusses information quality and valuation, master data and hierarchy management, business rules automation and business semantics as examples for business innovation opportunities. The book shows how to take "Business Concept Maps" further as information models for new IT paradigms. In a way this books redefines and extends business analysis towards solutions that can be described as business synthesis or business development. Business modellers, analysts and controllers, as well as enterprise information architects, will benefit from the intuitive modelling and designing approach presented in this book. The pragmatic and agile methods presented can be directly applied to improve the way organizations manage their business concepts and their relationships. "This book is a great contribution to the information management community. It combines a theoretical foundation with practical methods for dealing with important problems. This is rare and very useful. Conceptual models that communicate business reality effectively require some degree of creative imagination. As such, they combine the results of business analysis with communication design, as is extensively covered in this book." Dr. Malcolm Chisholm, President at AskGet.com Inc. “Truly understanding business requirements has always been a major stumbling block in business intelligence (BI) projects. In this book, Thomas Frisendal introduces a powerful technique—business concept mapping—that creates a virtual mind-meld between business users and business analysts. Frisendal does a wonderful explaining and demonstrating how this tool can improve the outcome of BI and other development projects ." Wayne Eckerson, executive director, BI Leadership Forum

This fully revised and updated edition of Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge recognizes that the future of economic well being in today's knowledge and information society rests upon the effectiveness of schools and corporations to empower their people to be more effective learners and knowledge creators. Novak’s pioneering theory of education presented in the first edition remains viable and useful. This new edition updates his theory for meaningful learning and autonomous knowledge building along with tools to make it operational ─ that is, concept maps, created with the use of CMapTools and the V diagram. The theory is easy to put into practice, since it includes resources to facilitate the process, especially concept maps, now optimised by CMapTools software. CMapTools software is highly intuitive and easy to use. People who have until now been reluctant to use the new technologies in their professional lives are will find this book particularly helpful. Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge is essential reading for educators at all levels and corporate managers who seek to enhance worker productivity.

Conversations About Group Concept Mapping: Applications, Examples, and Enhancements takes a concise, practice-based approach to group concept mapping. After defining the method, demonstrating how to design a project, and providing guidelines to analyze the results, this book then dives into real research exemplars. Conversations with the researchers are based on in depth interviews that connected method, practice and results. The conversations are from a wide variety of research settings, that include mapping the needs of at-risk African American youth, creating dialogue within a local business community, considering learning needs in the 21st century, and identifying the best ways to support teens receiving Supplemental Social Security Income. The authors reflect on the commonalities between the cases and draw out insights into the overall group concept mapping method from each case.

​This book undertakes to marry the concepts of "Concept Mapping" with a "Design Thinking" approach in the context of business analysis. While in the past a lot of attention has been paid to the business process side, this book now focusses information quality and valuation, master data and hierarchy management, business rules automation and business semantics as examples for business innovation opportunities. The book shows how to take "Business Concept Maps" further as information models for new IT paradigms. In a way this books redefines and extends business analysis towards solutions that can be described as business synthesis or business development. Business modellers, analysts and controllers, as well as enterprise information architects, will benefit from the intuitive modelling and designing approach presented in this book. The pragmatic and agile methods presented can be directly applied to improve the way organizations manage their business concepts and their relationships. "This book is a great contribution to the information management community. It combines a theoretical foundation with practical methods for dealing with important problems. This is rare and very useful. Conceptual models that communicate business reality effectively require some degree of creative imagination. As such, they combine the results of business analysis with communication design, as is extensively covered in this book." Dr. Malcolm Chisholm, President at AskGet.com Inc. “Truly understanding business requirements has always been a major stumbling block in business intelligence (BI) projects. In this book, Thomas Frisendal introduces a powerful technique—business concept mapping—that creates a virtual mind-meld between business users and business analysts. Frisendal does a wonderful explaining and demonstrating how this tool can improve the outcome of BI and other development projects ." Wayne Eckerson, executive director, BI Leadership Forum

formation. The basic ideas underlying knowledge visualization and information vi- alization are outlined. In a short preview of the contributions of this volume, the idea behind each approach and its contribution to the goals of the book are outlined. 2 The Basic Concepts of the Book Three basic concepts are the focus of this book: "data", "information", and "kno- edge". There have been numerous attempts to define the terms "data", "information", and "knowledge", among them, the OTEC Homepage "Data, Information, Kno- edge, and Wisdom" (Bellinger, Castro, & Mills, see http://www.syste- thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm): Data are raw. They are symbols or isolated and non-interpreted facts. Data rep- sent a fact or statement of event without any relation to other data. Data simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself.