With the continued growth of collections of electronic documents stored on personal computers, in corporate networks, and the Internet, we are faced with a daunting challenge. How can we manage this information and access it in an effective way that supports comprehension and makes better use of the knowledge that the electronic documents hold? The problem is critical to many research institutions and governmental and cooperate agencies that accumulate huge quantities of information on technological advances and research results, product designs, business and planning decisions and solutions. This dissertation research investigates the problem of information management and access. It proposes to use concept maps, a structured representation of human knowledge, to facilitate information access and support comprehension. Concept mapping has been used extensively in educational settings as a learning and teaching assessment tools and, more recently, as a knowledge elicitation tool to capture expert knowledge for preservation purposes. The strength of concept mapping lies in its simplicity, by which people of all ages have been able to construct concept maps on a variety of topics to document in a clear and concise form their knowledge for sharing with others. At a pragmatic level, the goal of the dissertation is to develop effective mechanisms to assist humans in navigating and comprehending electronic document libraries using concept maps as an interface through which information is accessed. In pursuit of this goal, the research will focus on models and algorithms to exploit the structure of concept maps and develop navigation and indexing tools to automatically link electronic documents to concept maps to facilitate document understanding and information access.
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