LAUSR

In conventional consensus building, written discourse is a typical tool that helps a small group of students exchange concepts to pursue a consensual resolution. However, this tool is not sufficiently effective to foster student attempts to form a consensus. Moreover, referential information is needed as evidence during group discussions. To address these problems, we propose a new approach to comparing and merging mind maps produced individually by students in a group. The proposed system integrates linked open data (LOD) standard web technologies to facilitate consensus-building processes. It also employs the resource description framework (RDF) to uniformly represent mind maps, which enables computability and sharing of mind maps. A prototype is developed and evaluated in a group of 24 students. The results show that the proposed system outperforms the traditional method significantly, as it improves students' performance in discovering new knowledge, creativity, group collaboration, and consensus reaching.