Link analysis in mind maps : a new approach to determining document relatedness

In a previous paper we presented various ideas on how information retrieval on mind maps could enhance applications such as expert systems, search engines and recommender systems. In this paper we present the first research results. In a brief experiment we researched link analysis respectively citation analysis, if applied to mind maps, is suitable to calculate document relatedness. The basic idea is that if two documents A and B are linked by the same mind map, these documents are likely to be related. This information could be used by item-based document recommender systems. In the example, document B could be recommended to those users interested in document A. In addition, we propose that those documents linked in high proximity within a mind map are more closely related than those documents linked in lower proximity. The results of our experiment support our ideas. It seems that link analysis applied to mind maps can be used for determining the relatedness of documents and therefore for improving document recommender systems