An on-line framework for experimenting with concept maps

A Concept Map provides a graphical, hierarchical, representation of a domain of knowledge, and can be used by teachers to define and organize the content of a course. The use of existing concept maps, possibly implemented by means of tested and suitable learning material, can be of great help for the teacher, while defining her/his own concept map. In this context, being able to establish the similarity between two concept maps is a significant asset, allowing to limit the analysis of other maps, and focus on those that can be of actual help for the teacher. This is true in a special way if the measure is computed 'according to one among many possible pedagogical criteria of similarity'. We are working on the definition of measures entailing similarity based on different pedagogical criteria. In this paper, we meet the problem of experimenting such with measures, and comparing them with baseline measures, while investigating the effectiveness of a new measure. To support this kind of analysis we propose here a web-based system. We show the characteristics of the system, and use it to compare the behaviour of three measures of similarity: the pre-requisite measure (also presented) computes the similarity of two maps with respect to a particular pedagogical aspect. The other two measures are used as a baseline. We conclude that the system has shown its usefulness and can be used for more extensive analysis of other measures.