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Posted
2 months
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
SUMMARY: With the Open University's support, Compendium's user and developer community have self-organised to take its future software development forward. BACKGROUND: The OU's Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) and
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Verizon co-founded the Compendium Institute. In 2002 KMi became the software development hub, releasing Compendium as a freely distributed application, funded by external research grants, and resulting in a significant body of research. In 2009, KMi and Verizon released Compendium Open Source under the LGPL licence. In recent years, KMi's knowledge mapping research interests have shifted to web-centric platforms for "Contested Collective Intelligence", such as Cohere and Evidence Hub, meaning that Compendium is not (at present) under continuous development by the KMi team. Future projects may reactivate KMi's development of Compendium, and they continue to study the data from its usage.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
Compendium is considered so valuable by its user community, that it has self-organised to ensure that it remains a living software application. The community has been discussing the possibility of driving the development of Compendium through a community effort. In late 2012 the Compendium Institute fully backed this movement and two teleconferences spanning the globe were initiated - and of course facilitated through Compendium (see links below for illustrations of the output from real-time Dialogue Mapping -- thanks KC Burgess Yakemovic).
Emerging from these, a number of ideas for the future development of Compendium were collected and the requirements for setting up the development of Compendium as open source were discussed. Based on these developments a small group of dedicated users and developers started the development of CompendiumNG, with NG standing for 'next generation', or short CNG. They have already made good progress in setting up a project on the GitHub open source code hosting platform, have resolved some pervasive bugs, and are now preparing the code for solid open source development.
The first release of CNG is just around the corner, and they have set up a project website which you can find at: www.compendiumng.org [Less]
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Posted
over 1 year
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry presents a unique combination of challenges. Building materials and energy expenditures account for substantial proportions of UK consumption but the means to improve on these are
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inhibited by poorly integrated decision-making across the building lifecycle.
Compendium has been used in a pilot study of civil engineering information management to determine its compatibility with existing practices and to develop use scenarios for future work. Data was collected through adaptation of existing documents into map-based formats, examination of information repositories and interviews with engineers exposed to the mapping methods on a live project [1].
Results echo previous work comparing these industries, highlight current limitations of "paperless" visions and point to adapted mapping methods that better fit the civil engineering context. For example, a great deal of information is spread across weekly reporting materials (presentations and minor drawing updates). The map-based representation provides opportunities to instead capture an evolving, synthesized representation that saves reporting time and improves reusability. Participating engineers were also keen to drive tasks from larger overviews of needed information for key decisions.
Future work will seek to extend this study by engaging additional companies, informing clients about potential gains in transparency and fleshing out identified scenarios.
[1] Eng, N., Marfisi, E., & Aurisicchio, M. (2011). Adapting Aerospace Design Rationale Mapping to Civil Engineering: A Preliminary Study. Proc. of International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED11). Copenhagen, Denmark. [Less]
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Posted
over 1 year
ago
by
Andrea Berardi
Today, 1st September 2011, is the start of a three year €1.9 million European Commission Seventh Framework project, called COBRA (Community Owned Best practice for sustainable Resource Adaptive management in the Guiana Shield, South America).
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It's a project that is led by Jay Mistry (Royal Holloway, University of London), together with eight other partners across Europe and South America.
Jay Mistry, Simon Buckingham-Shum and other colleagues at The Open University have already worked together on a pilot project integrating Compendium and a Geographical Information System, UDig, within the same natural resource management context (see http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/ecosensus/ ). It's fantastic to see how Compendium has evolved since the Ecosensus project, and we're planning to make full use of the new functionality.
The main methodological tool which we will be using in COBRA is Participatory Video, and yesterday Jay and I gave a "blended" hypermedia/physical presentation at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference using video and image embedded within Compendium.
I've just made a brief YouTube video describing the project and our intended use of Compendium (with the Compendium movie facility running in the background -- to note that I've reduced the screen capture to one frame per second to avoid confusion between me talking on screen and my voice-over). [Less]
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Posted
about 2 years
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
As part of our university-wide doctoral training programme, which we're opening increasingly to the world as open educational resources, here's the webcast and multimedia resources from my keynote at last week's Open University
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Research Methods conference. The Cloudscape from this event, which was live-blogged, is itself a great resource to mine (see also the Research Skills clouds).
It was fun putting this together, and I squeezed in as many movies and live demos as possible from the many projects we've done with Compendium to illustrate how far Bush's original conception of the Memex has come, and how far a particular hypermedia tool with a very simple notation can go...
Abstract: In this talk I will introduce the work of the Hypermedia Discourse Group at the Knowledge Media Institute, which is focusing on how software tools may shape the future of scholarship. Our particular interest is in how new forms of narrative can emerge through the use of hypertext tools that treat ideas, problems and arguments as coherent networks of nodes. This enables us to reframe qualitative data analysis, and scientific publishing, as the construction of narrative networks, grounded in primary sources. I will illustrate this with examples from projects including the NASA Mobile Agents project, the Hewlett Foundation OLnet project, and the AHRC+EPRSC+JISC e-Dance project. [Less]
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Posted
over 2 years
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
Jack Park writes... "Today, I uploaded an issue map to the Compendium maps section of the Open University's moodle website. The issue map was created with the kind permission of John Cook, owner of skepticalscience.com, which provided
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the conversation material necessary.
My thesis research mission includes the collection of a text corpus representing arguments on both sides of some issue. When I mapped the site, there were 126 arguments; there are now 127. Along the way, I decided that two of the arguments were essentially saying the same thing, so I merged them in my map, which is what my thesis research is about: federating conversations.
In a subsequent post, I shall describe what is expected of that text corpus. For purposes of my initial research, the text collected from this one website and sites linked to it should provide a sufficient starting text corpus." [Less]
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Posted
over 2 years
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
In October 2010, we started www.SynBio.Fuerundwider.org - a website dedicated to the discussions on societal impacts of synthetic biology. The website operates with argument maps; most of them are produced with Compendium. Other elements are
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comments, Open Eds, news regarding synthethic biology, and summaries of the ongoing discussion in the maps. The project - a pilot to prove the practicability of our concept of guided online argument mapping - was funded partly by the Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften (acatech) and supported by Wissenschaftspressekonferenz e.V. (WPK).
Before going online, we assembled reports and recommendations on synthethic biology that have been published in the last years. With this material, we started to build our maps. Next, a moderator approached stakeholders in the field (i.e. scientists, NGOs, company representatives and politicians) and asked them for help to work out critical points in more detail or to resolve remaining questions (e.g. Do synthetic organisms, due to their fundamentally new and incomparable nature, require new methods of risk assessment? Will our understanding of ‚life' be changed by synthetic biology?).
The contributions of a number of stakeholders, that we collected via email, via the comment section on the website, and via telephone conversations, were integrated into the growing map. A jury (consisting of: a journalist, an NGO representative, a scientist and a biotech-entrepreneur) ensured that all sides of the debate were represented equally.
Our results: Overall, the role model of our approach turned out to be not only a typical online-debate but rather the online-version of a stakeholder conference. Within just a few weeks, we were able to involve about two dozen experts in the discussion and collect their arguments. The online-maps did a great job in organizing and guiding the conversations with our experts, which in turn advanced the map further. Our goal (which was accomplished) was to create a map that all contributors agreed upon (in terms of fair and thorough representation of arguments). We are confident, that at least in those areas of the debate that we covered, the gathered material is much more detailed than what can be found in most of the literature that existed beforehand.
The results were presented at a Parliamentary evening event in Berlin in November 2010. The map will also serve as a tool for critical assessment of future reports, such as the report of the Technology Assessment Buro (TAB) of the German parliament, which will start its work on a report about synthetic biology in Spring 2011.
Other examples can be seen below. [Less]
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Posted
over 2 years
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
Today sees the launch of the British Library's major new exhibition on how digital tools are transforming research, including KMi's e-Dance Project, which funded and inspired the development of Compendium 2.0. Growing Knowledge:
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The Evolution of Research, runs from 12 October 2010 - 16 July 2011. We're delighted to say that the e-Dance Project (in collaboration with Univ. Bedfordshire, Leeds & Manchester) was selected as one of the examples, showcasing how close collaboration between technology researchers (originally developing Access Grid video-conferencing/collaboration tools, and Compendium hypermedia mapping, in an e-Science context) enables arts and humanities researchers, in this case Choreographic researchers/practitioners, to break new ground playing with time and space in their discipline.
The e-Dance exhibit presents video material introducing the project, with examples of the technologies in action.
Follow the links below to learn more about Compendium e-Dance Edition, and the podcast link to see how it fits into the research and teaching of choreography.
e-Dance was funded by the joint AHRC+EPSRC+JISC e-Science Initiative. [Less]
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Posted
almost 3 years
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
If you want a web-based exchange for Compendium Maps, you can use the open source Moodle system. Moodle is the world's leading open source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), used in many educational and corporate
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institutions.
Features:
* Provide learners/educators with integrated uploading, browsing and downloading maps (as HTML+XML exports).
* Moodle administrators can view textual+graphical statistics of uploads and downloads of maps, and Compendium software downloads [Less]
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Posted
about 3 years
ago
by
Michelle Bachler
Compendium 2.0 (beta 1) contains many exciting new features that expand the boundaries of what you can do with the software, as well as enhance its existing capabilities. Movie Maps: You can bring videos directly into a new kind of
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Compendium view, called a "Movie Map." With this you can add nodes and links on top of a movie, having these annotations appear and disappear wherever you want over the length of the video. You can even animate maps without a video, so that you can add movement to your maps.
Curvy, thick links! and other kinds of link formatting: Links can now be curved, or squared as well as straight. They can also be dashed. Link labels can now be formatted in the same way as node labels, with different font sizes, styles, and colors.
Enhanced customization: Compendium now lets you customize many aspects of its appearance to match the needs of your organization, project, or personal preferences. You can specify what maps get automatically created with new projects, as well as aspects of the splash image and text when Compendium starts, the About screen, and the graphics and links that display for a new project.
Performance improvements for sharing Compendium over the Internet: Compendium 2.0 contains many speed and processing improvements that greatly speed remote access and manipulation of shared Compendium projects.
Email integration:You can enable Compendium to send "real" email when a new item has been added to your Compendium inbox.
Internationalization: Compendium's menus, controls, and other features can now appear in any language through externalized interface strings.
Improved management of Linked Files: Compendium lets you attach any sort of files to Reference nodes. Moving Compendium projects between machines often means taking care of many linked file locations. A new Linked Files browser now lets you sort your linked reference files. This is especially useful when using Compendium for shared projects over the net. You can see what external files are being referenced in a project, which nodes they are belong to, and where they are located (indicating also if they are lost, or long longer exist at the stored location).
Template improvements: We have added some default templates for people to try. We have also extended the way the Templates folders are processed so Help information can be added in the form of HTML files. They will be displayed in the Templates menu (see the Compendium Help system for full details). [Less]
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Posted
about 3 years
ago
by
Simon Buckingham Shum
In recent work with psychotherapists, we've been using Compendium to convert their usual notes from analytic group sessions, into maps that reflect key aspects of the group dynamics. The Compendium design team has always envisaged the
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tool as analogous to spreadsheets for ideas: "Excel for Knowledge" if you will. Instead of handy tools for working with numbers, the vision is for an intuitive tool providing scaffolding for rendering, linking, structuring, categorising and debating ideas, with a customisable user experience, without knowing in advance what the domain of application will be.
We could map participant interactions in any drawing package, of course, but Compendium has a full database behind it: nodes and links are hypertext elements, not just dumb graphical objects. Compendium's ability to design and assign combinations of tags (keywords, equivalent to qualitative data analysis codes), coupled with node embedding (rendering a given node in the network in multiple views), offers the prospect of conducting longitudinal comparative analyses across sessions, at both the individual and group levels.
The blog post below provides more details and examples, with commentary on how we used Compendium's different elements to create this vertical application. [Less]
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