VUE (Visual Understanding Environment)

Company / Author

Tufts University

Screenshots

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What they say

“The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) provides faculty and students with a concept mapping tool to integrate digital resources into their teaching and learning. VUE is developed by Tufts University Academic Technology department.

VUE 2.0 pushes beyond the limits of traditional mapping tools by allowing users to build presentations based upon their concept maps. This takes presenters off the linear path that they are traditionally confined to with slideshow tools and instead allows them to build multi-dimensional presentations, and opens entirely new ways of presenting data and conveying ideas.

VUE also supports federated searching against many different data sources including MFA, JStor, ArtStor, Google, Yahoo, PubMed and others. Users can employ these resources to enhance maps and presentations with content from sources they know and trust.

VUE makes use of semantic web technology to allow comparisons between many maps, so for example, an instructor can easily tell if their students truly understand the material. VUE can use OWL ontologies to allow constrained mapping based on the vocabulary of a specific field, be it life sciences, medicine, or an ontology specifically created to help support a business. The official release of VUE 2 includes:

• Tools for dynamic presentation of maps
• Map merge and analysis tools
• Enhanced keyword tagging and search capabilities
• Support for semantic mapping using ontologies
• Expanded search of online resources (Flickr, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Twitter, PubMed, etc.)
• Ability to publish your VUE maps directly to Fedora digital repositories and Sakai”

Observations

Their website

http://vue.tufts.edu/

Operating System(s)

Linux | Mac | Windows

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Price: Free  |  Status: Current  |  Date added: 2007-05-16