Compendium: Get Visual & go to the Source
Simon Buckingham Shum
09.07.04
An historic milestone has been reached with the release of the source code for Compendium, KMi's widely used semantic hypertext concept mapping tool. This is coupled with the release of v1.3.04 which enables users to define their own node and link types, and annotate images.
Compendium has an interesting history which has brought us to this point. First in the early 1990s, there was the Jeff Conklin's QuestMap product, and it was working with him on this that inspired Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis at NYNEX (as Verizon was then) to extend it in powerful new ways, originally codenamed Mifflin, now simply called Compendium (see the note on QuestMap and Compendium).
Thanks to the resources invested first by Verizon, and more recently by The Open University's CoAKTinG Project (funded by the UK's EPSRC and e-Science Programme), we have a robust tool that is now well out of the research lab and into serious, real world usage.
This process has seen Compendium's licensing terms gradually open up, first with the OU licensed to work on it with a small group of partners, then able to distribute the binary to the world. Now at last we can make the source code available!
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