A Unique, Fascinating Program!

[AL DOM]

Visual Understanding Environment: VUE.

VUE is quite a unique program! I have not seen anything like it. VUE reminds one of a concept and mind map; however, it is much more than a traditional mind map.

Visual Understanding Environment collates, manages, and displays digital Information. It is an Open Source project developed by Tufts University and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Digital information continues to increase, leading to information overload and confusion. To address these concerns, VUE takes concept mapping one step further. VUE imports, structures, manages, and presents digital information, published works, and data.


When Concept maps are connected to digital resources, concept maps become content maps.

VUE provides a rich, visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.

One of the unique features of VUE is its ability to analyze websites and online repositories of information and AUTOMATICALLY important this data into its map and presentation. One can then rearrange this data as one wishes.

VUE has tools to connect to information located on the Web, Fedora based repositories, FTP servers, local files, systems, and more.

Users can query online registries of available resources and add these resources to VUE.


VUE has the following features:


1- VUE can import RSS feeds, CSV files, join two CSV datasets, map a Zotero collection, and use Seasr integration.

2- VUE can analyze the contents of a web page and begin constructing a map based on that analysis, bringing in various resources including your Zotero collections, RSS Feeds, and data from other repositories like the New York Times Article API, and Flickr.

3- Ontologies.

Authors may now import ontologies defined in RDF-S or OWL formats directly into VUE, allowing for the creation of concept maps from pre-defined object and relationship types. VUE allows for a defined mapping vocabulary, scaffolds map creation, and supports computer- assisted map comparison and assessment.

The visual characteristics of objects and relationships defined in an ontology may also be styled via a CSS file.

4- Resources.

VUE allows users to dynamically add and search repositories of digital information via the Resources window. VUE also supports federated searching across digital libraries and repositories. Resources are "plug-ins" that can be added to the VUE Resources window to search a variety of digital sources directly from within VUE.

Resources include: Fedora, Flickr, JStor, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, PubMed (NCBI), Sakai, Summize, Twitter Search, Wikipedia (searched by Yahoo), and Yahoo.

5- Publish.

VUE allows you to make your maps available to others by uploading them to digital repositories / libraries, or LMS systems on which you have an account and /or publishing privileges. Publishing to Fedora and Sakai are currently supported.


Learn more about VUE. After the text, view the brief introductory
video, which does not do justice to VUE.

Click:

http://vue.tufts.edu/about/index.cfm

Then learn about the many features of VUE.

View the following videos which present the versatility, power, and capabilities of VUE.

Click:

http://vue.tufts.edu/features/index.cfm

Learn about Ontologies available to VUE.

View these Ontologies/resources available for VUE.

Click:

http://vue.tufts.edu/resources/index.cfm

This is a fascinating program! And, it is still in development.

AL