Benefits of document maps for text access in knowledge management
Andreas Becks, Christian Seeling, Ralf Minkenberg · 2002
Analyzing, structuring and organizing documented knowledge is an important aspect of knowledge management. In order to ease the access to text collections, in literature so-called document maps have been proposed which visualize the inherently vague semantic similarity structure of a corpus of documents. In this paper we investigate a document map system which is specifically designed for typical text access tasks in knowledge management. Based on an empirical task-model we present design, realization and results of a comparative laboratory study which evaluates the document map concept against an alternative text-access interface. We show that the graphical overview offers significant benefits over a text-based access interface for certain knowledge management tasks. We also discuss its drawbacks and point to further system improvements which promise to make the technology even more effective.