Concept maps — a guide to capturing relationships

A concept map is a powerful tool for organizing and visualizing complex information in an associative map. Please read my motivational article if you are unfamiliar with concept maps and why I believe they are essential in building your personal knowledge management (PKM) system. You may also be interested in my article on how concept maps can act as an organization layer on top of other well-known notetaking systems such as the slip-box method.

This article is more hands-on and focus on the typical relationships you may use to connect concepts in your map. In the simplest form, a concept map consists of nodes (the concepts) and edges representing some form of relationship between the concepts. To get started, we may view a concept map as a number of noun-verb-noun relationships.

However, this is a bit too simplistic for building rich concept maps. “Real” maps require a more structured and elaborate view on relationships between the concepts. Generally speaking, the following edge types can capture most, if not all, relationships between concepts.

• Specialization — Y and Z are a variant or X has variants Y and Z.
• Part-whole — Y and Z are parts of X or X consists of Y and Z.
• Association — Y is connected to X by the relationship Z, e.g., ownership or uses.
• Temporal — a step in a process. First X, then Y or Y follows X.
• Causal — a possibility that X causes or leads to Y.