Towards Semantic Comparison of Concept Maps for Structuring Learning Activities

Concept maps are significant tools able to support several tasks in the educational area such as curriculum design, knowledge organization and modeling, students' assessment and many others. Algorithms for comparing graphs have been extensively studied in the literature, but they do not appear appropriate for concept maps. In concept maps, concepts exposed are at least as relevant as the structure that contains them. Neglecting the semantic and didactic aspect inevitably causes inaccuracies and the consequently limited applicability in automated systems. In this work, starting from an algorithm which compares didactic characteristic of concept maps, we present an extension which exploits a semantic approach to catch the actual meaning of the concepts expressed in the nodes of the map. We also present experimental results.