Empirical Validation of Concept Maps: Preliminary Methodological Considerations

For their usage in the semantic web, valid ontologies are required for a given domain. Here we focus on ontologies represented as concept maps (semantic nets). For one and the same domain several alternative concept maps may exist, originating from different world views or purposes. Some of these concept maps may be valid, however not all of them. Thus, efforts for validating empirically and objectively concept maps in the respective context are necessary. We outline two methodological approaches for empirically validating concept maps, one for giving evidence of content validity of a concept map and one for application validity. One procedure is to validate a given concept map with concept maps generated systematically by others. For this, persons of different knowledge level, are prompted to externalise their understanding of the domain through a concept mapping task. For giving evidence of the content validity of a given concept map, the similarity between the given concept map and...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICALT
• Authors: Dietrich Albert, Christina M. Steiner
• Keywords: Alternative Concept Maps, Concept Map, Content Validity, ICALT 2005, Machine Learning