Ranking Concept Map Retrieval in the CmapTools Network

Concept maps are very good at organizing knowledge about a wide variety of subjects. However, they present some difficulties and opportunities when it comes to the retrieval of concept maps based on individual query terms. In this paper, we review the search architecture of CmapTools and some of the key issues involved in the ranking of concept maps search results. We compare several different methods for ranking the results of a query term search on concept maps. We draw conclusions and present some ideas for future work.