Knowledge forest: a novel model to organize knowledge fragments

TL;DR

The paper introduces the knowledge forest model, which organizes knowledge fragments and learning dependencies to address knowledge scattering and disorientation in educational resources.

Contribution

It proposes a novel knowledge organization model combining facet trees and learning dependencies to improve knowledge management and learning experience.

Findings

Knowledge forest effectively organizes knowledge fragments.

It alleviates information overload for learners.

It reduces learning disorientation by clarifying topic dependencies.

Abstract

With the rapid growth of knowledge, it shows a steady trend of knowledge fragmentization. Knowledge fragmentization manifests as that the knowledge related to a specific topic in a course is scattered in isolated and autonomous knowledge sources. We term the knowledge of a facet in a specific topic as a knowledge fragment. The problem of knowledge fragmentization brings two challenges: First, knowledge is scattered in various knowledge sources, which exerts users' considerable efforts to search for the knowledge of their interested topics, thereby leading to information overload. Second, learning dependencies which refer to the precedence relationships between topics in the learning process are concealed by the isolation and autonomy of knowledge sources, thus causing learning disorientation. To solve the knowledge fragmentization problem, we propose a novel knowledge organization model, knowledge forest, which consists of facet trees and learning dependencies. Facet trees can organize knowledge fragments with facet hyponymy to alleviate information overload. Learning dependencies can organize disordered topics to cope with learning disorientation. We conduct extensive experiments on three manually constructed datasets from the Data Structure, Data Mining, and Computer Network courses, and the experimental results show that knowledge forest can effectively organize knowledge fragments, and alleviate information overload and learning disorientation.