Prospects of Mind Maps for Better Visualization of Infrastructure Literature

Abstract

Literature analysis is important for the identification of the state of existing knowledge and prevailing research gaps. Effective literature analysis, however, is a lengthy process and requires a large effort to consider the information from different viewpoints and to identify areas of cross benefits. This paper represents an approach to summarize the information related to the construction and infrastructure domains by using a category of visual tools referred to as mind maps. First, the capabilities of various knowledge mapping tools for graphically representing the hierarchical concepts (keywords) of a given domain of knowledge are discussed, and example mind maps are developed for the infrastructure asset management domain. Enhancements to mind maps are then proposed on the basis of an extensive literature analysis to visually show numerical scores of various publications associated with the concepts in the mind map. This facilitates the identification of the highly relevant and the most useful knowledge in the literature. Suggestions are then presented for the use of mind maps by publishers of large literature databases to facilitate better analysis and the visual access and retrieval of information from the literature.