Methodology
In the methodology adopted by us, we have followed the KR approach to
organize biological knowledge and create a knowledge base. The steps fol-
lowed are: to organize concepts on the basis of their cognitive function;
to assign valid and authentic semantic relations to the concepts; to ana-
lyze the knowledge-base based on the usage of different kinds of semantic
relations applied; to compare the novice’s knowledge structure with that
of an experts knowledge structure; to restructure (reorganize) to align the
novice’s knowledge structure with the experts knowledge structure; and fi-
nally to develop a minimal set of relation types (knowledge organizers) for
representing the entire domain of biology. Graphical representation such
as concept maps, concept graphs can be generated based on the knowledge
base. We would like to point out that at this stage, we have managed to
fulfill the first two objectives which are presented in this article and the
latter ones are part of our ongoing research project[11].
Organizing concepts on the basis of their cognitive func-
tion
Knowledge organizers consists of (1) concepts (ObjectTypes) and the types
of concepts (MetaTypes) used in knowledge (2) types of relations used to
relate the concepts (RelationTypes) and (3) logical connectors and quanti-
fiers used to express the knowledge. We start with organizing the body of
knowledge into concepts and relations (monadic predicates as attributes,
and dyadic predicates as relations). The type of concepts are organized in
the MetaType layer. The type concepts (general) are organized in the Type
layer and the instances (specific) are organized in the Token layer.
Concepts are first to be organized based on their cognitive function de-
pending upon what they explain. For example, ‘mitochondria’ refers to a
structural part of a cell, and so it is instantiated under MetaType structural
concept; ‘protein synthesis’ refers to a process and hence it is instantiated
under MetaType process concept; ‘prophase’ which is one of the stages in-
volved during the cell division (mitosis), is instantiated under MetaType
stage concept. It may be noted that relations established in this step are