Recommend-er Systems

Recommend-er Systems are the software components which keep track of the user activity over an internet and remembers the user’s choice of interest and then suggests the results which will be best suited to the user. To study the user’s interest it may focus on user data which is fed by the users while registering on certain sites, it can keep track of past history where users have spent maximum time etc. Though recommend-er systems were initially designed for recommending news articles, now a days they are mostly used in recommending the items to customers in various e-commerce websites. Also they play a major role in recommending research papers for the scientists and researchers. Recommend-er systems were developed based user profiles or by taking details from social networking sites or by tracking history of user. Research was never done with respect to Mind Mapping based recommend-er systems. But then a group of researchers from DOCEAR studied and implemented a Recommend-er System for their own Mind Mapping software. They published their paper on the same by the name: Mind-Map Based User Modelling and Research Paper Recommend-er Systems.
Even though use of mind mapping techniques gives comparatively higher click through rates than traditional methods, the obtained click through rates can not be treated as best results one can ever get. So, it is needed to research in this flow to find our more methods which further improves the click through rates.

Mind Mapping - Exactly how brain works

"Your brain is like a sleeping giant", lines said by Tony Buzan. Mind maps were first invented by Tony Buzan in 1960’s when he got frustrated with traditional note taking techniques. He worked for over 40 years in the field of working with brains and he dedicated his full life developing the techniques which helps an individual think in better and creative ways. He emphasizes on the fact that each individual should use his/her full mental potential in thinking and doing work. He with his partners in ThinkBuzan is continuously working to awaken the brains of individuals. Their mission is to awaken the genius within. They defined Mind Mapping as a method by which the information about anything is gathered, organised and new ideas are developed and represented in a pictorial form. Colours, images and hyperlinks etc. are included so as to make them more attractive and easy to remember. Mind maps are also used in the tasks like brainstorming. They worked with an ambition of developing more and more mental literacy techniques to make the brain most efficient. For that they tried to combine visual and spacial aspects with keywords. This lets an indivitual to have a control over their thinking process.

Mind Maps were initially drawn with hands on a big paper with the help of different colours. Usually main idea is kept at the centre of the paper and sub-ideas are represented as branches to the central idea. Tony Buzan and his team developed their own Mind Mapping software namely ‘iMindMap’ which lets the user draw their Mind Maps on their computer screens and save the Mind Maps as image files. Later lot many Mind Mapping software’s were developed by many other people which provides more and more functionality to make mind mapping more prosperous. Some Mind Mapping software’s allow users to add links to some websites; with some, users can add links to pdf’s of reference research papers on their hard drive. When people started exploring the applications of mind mapping they came across various fields in which mind maps can be productively used and the work done by them formed an interesting thesis.