Work in progress: A semantic annotation scheme for Concept Maps

Concept Maps (CM) are custom-made graphical representations whose understanding (and therefore socialization and reuse) depends on adequate explanation by the author and so their main advantage is also their main constraint: the freedom to represent concepts and relationships between them in any way, mostly in idiosyncratic and not understandable ones. In this paper we show how information on meaning and application contexts of a Concept Map can be represented and how it would be added to a learning object database ordinarily accessed by teachers and students. We use a freely available CM editor and from the XML textual representation of a map, metadata are defined with additional information on its meaning as defined by the author and on the contexts in which it has been used. That representation of an annotated map is then incorporated into a functional learning objects database (a LO category that includes software developed for educational purposes). This scheme for semantic annotation has been analyzed through a case study with students from a Software Development Tech course, who reported their impressions when creating, socializing and reusing maps with FLOCOS database environment.