Concept Mapping and Expert Systems: Exploring Synergies

Concept maps and expert systems are both in the soft toolbar of knowledge modelling. We have spent nearly two decades developing our expert system shell “Doctus”. Several years ago we have seen the first concept mapping solutions and started using them very soon. Frequently we have found ourselves using both tools in a particular research or consultancy project and started to wander how the two could be combined to achieve synergies. We came up with several ideas, typically when we have faced a situation which called for one of the potential synergies. In this paper we present the first of these ideas in elaborated form of a conceptual model and we also mention few additional ideas as our plans for future research. In this first idea we combine different kinds of concept maps and our expert system in order to map organisational knowledge. The expert system here is used in machine learning mode, i.e. the resulting concept map will be capable of learning – this is our intelligent concept