Enriching search queries to construct comprehensive concept maps for online inquiries: A case study of a food web

Concept maps have recently been widely applied to pedagogical tasks, such as eliciting the acquired knowledge of students or scaffolding their online inquiry with a knowledge structure. Moreover, there is a growing need to develop an assistance mechanism that supports concept map construction due to the increasing volume of learning resources available online. The aim of this study is to develop a query expansion-based approach to assist students in efficiently retrieving appropriate knowledge from the Internet and constructing more comprehensive concept maps. The validity of the proposed approach is measured through a comparison of its results of a food web construction with those from a biology textbook. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach can provide sound results that are close to expert skeleton concept maps. The fndings show that query expansion can help expand search queries, and can serve as a great source of inspiration for the construction of comprehensive concept maps.