The Use of Concept Maps to Represent Medical Knowledge

Abstract

Concept maps are bi-dimensional representations of cognitive structures showing the hierarchies and the interconnections of concepts involved in a discipline or a subdiscipline. Concept maps can be done in different ways, but they are best done using computer software designed in this purpose. They are very useful in a variety of fields and also in medicine. In medicine, uses of concept maps are: in individual and cooperative learning, evaluation, course planning, in creating new knowledge and in identifying new fields of research, in analyzing and communicating complex ideas and relationships, in management, planning, organizing, projects follow up, in forming searching requests for searching engines used to search electronic databases, in constructing the architecture of a database.