Modelling Higher-Level Thought Structures – Method & Tool

Knowledge articulation costs are the bottleneck for efficient Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). Current tools either allow to few structures and hence have to rely only on keyword searches in plain text, allow no associative browsing, and cannot infer new knowledge. Semantic modelling tools on the other hands are too cumbersome to use and force the user to formalise everything all the time – this is too costly in PKM usage. Conceptual Data Structures (CDS) are what is found to be the largest common denominator of information structures used in common knowledge artefacts. CDS allow step-wise and gradual formalisation and representing the spectrum from informal notes up to formal ontologies. This paper describes the CDS data model and ontology in detail and shows how CDS can largely be implemented with existing semantic web technologies.