Concept maps advantages

This representation is offered even more tentatively than Kinder and Harland offered their hierarehy, but it has been included to provoke some debate about its improvement or other alternative ways of representing these inter-relationships. The advantage of the concept map is that it not only allows positional relationships to be established and displayed, but it also requires the nature of those relationships to be defined. This map is not complete and still oversimplifies the complexities it attempts to represent, but it does force some thinking about the interdependence of different categories of outcome without being too hierarchical. 

Think about a mind map and a concept-map on the topic of acid-base-chemistry. List advantages and disadvantages for both forms of visual representation. 

The advantage of the dispersing principle is related to the relatively low technical expenditure to achieve dispersion, i.e. the simplicity of the concept. However, as flow patterns may change and are not known for new systems, they have to be identified, documented as flow-pattern maps and controlled. Thus, some analytical characterization has to be done in advance of the experiment. Hence inspection windows again are essential (for the first prototype they may be eliminated later). 

Acknowledging the advantages of paperless rather than paper-based operation, it should be realized that the benefit of a paperless operation can only be truly exploited through top-down planning, similar to the concept of BPR. An operation going paperless needs to map what the workflow is, what papers are created and how they interact. Like a BPR project, this needs to be addressed by a cross-functional effort mapping the present situation, the envisioned future and the steps to be followed to get there. 

An important simplification in the study of intermetallic compounds is provided by the concept of isotypism. Several compounds have the same composition, the same structure with the same coordination polyhedra We say that they are isotypic and identify a "structure type". For example, nearly 280 CsCI-type and more than 150 MngSis-type binary phases are reported in the literature. We can take advantage from this fact and, chosen a given composition, try a systematization of the structural types. In other words, we can build a map where are retried the representative points of all the isotypic phases. If the coordinates of the map are correctly chosen, we should be able to define a region for the occurrence of each structure type. It is clear that such a map could be a useful guide in synthesizing new materieils with a desired structure and with desired physical properties, but it is also clear that the approach is phenomenological and based on already known experimental data. 

The concepts, as well as the corresponding step-by-step methodology for the analysis of the IPM data (called the Ideal Profile Analysis (IPA)), will be presented. Finally, the advantages/inconveniences of the IPM and its practical use compared to other methods (such as the Preference Mapping or JAR scale) will be discussed. 

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