| Analogies are essential in human cognition, reasoning, learning, communication, and problem solving. They can have a profound and broad effect on how we view and understand our world. In this dissertation we design, implement, and evaluate a Web-based system for representing, retrieving, and visualizing human-conceived analogies that provides a medium and a common language for analogy practitioners to share their analogies. To accomplish this, we review the components of analogies, and develop a general representation of their structure. We then develop a compact XML content model of this representation for use in Web-based environments, and show that the model is capable of representing a wide range of human-conceived analogies. We demonstrate, using XSLT, several example methods for visualizing analogy expressions that use our model. We demonstrate methods for storing and retrieving such expressions, and develop methods for ranking the retrieved expressions. We designed and implemented the MARVIN (Markup for Analogy Representation and Visualization for the InterNet) system to demonstrate these methods. A formative evaluation of the MARVIN system by analogy authors and end users was conducted; both author evaluators and user evaluators agreed that the MARVIN system analogy visualizations can assist them in their use of analogies, and that the system's ability to retrieve analogies and alternates is also of value. |
