Compendium diagrammatically represents thoughts as nodes displayed as labeled icons—with types such as issues/questions, ideas/answers, arguments, references, and decisions—and represents interconnections between different nodes.7 It can be used for applications as varied as: issue mapping in meetings, design rationales and requirements analysis, meeting management (agendas and minutes), action item and issue tracking, requirements management, classification, management templates, and reference databases (such as personal knowledge bases).89
The software can be used by a group of people in a collaborative manner to document their collective ideas using visual diagrams. A group facilitation method called dialogue mapping is especially suited for use with Compendium.10
Compendium templates for critical thinking can be used to create argument maps using the argumentation schemes developed by argumentation theory scholars such as Douglas N. Walton, Chris Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno.11 Argumentation schemes are pre-defined patterns of reasoning for analysing and constructing arguments; each scheme is accompanied by a list of critical questions that can be used to evaluate whether a particular argument is good or fallacious. By using these argumentation schemes, users of Compendium can examine claims in more detail to uncover their implicit logical substructure and improve the rigor and depth of discussions.12
There are ten default types of node: question, answer, list view, map view, pro, con, note, decision, reference, argument.13 There are three types of relationship between nodes: associative, transclusive, categorical.14 Images can be placed directly into a view, assigned to a node, or assigned to the background picture.15 Features of Compendium include:16
Users can choose to use Compendium with either the Apache Derby (internal) or MySQL (external) relational database management system.17
The software is networked and supports concurrency and different views when using MySQL.
Compendium is the result of fifteen years of development in collaborative modeling, initiated in the mid-1990s by Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis at NYNEX Science & Technology; the theory behind the software hails from the 1970s, when IBIS was first conceptualised by Horst Rittel. Selvin and Sierhuis built on Jeff Conklin's earlier hypertext issue mapping software: gIBIS and QuestMap.18
Many associations have thence contributed ideas to the development of Compendium. These institutions include Blue Oxen Associates, Center for Creative Leadership, Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, Verizon, CogNexus Institute, and Agent iSolutions.19 In 2012, the Compendium community established CompendiumNG to further advance and develop the software.20
"Compendium project". Knowledge Media Institute, Open University. 2009. Retrieved 11 January 2015. http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/compendium/ ↩
"Compendium Institute (archived)". projects.buckinghamshum.net. Retrieved 26 August 2018. http://projects.buckinghamshum.net/compendiuminstitute/ ↩
Buckingham Shum, Simon J (13 February 2009). "Compendium released open source". Compendium Institute. Archived from the original on 22 January 2019. Retrieved 11 January 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20190122140838/http://compendium.open.ac.uk/news/rostra/news.php@r=55&t=2&id=41.htm ↩
"Introduction to Compendium: Tutorial, Version 1.3.4, June 2006" (PDF). projects.buckinghamshum.net. Retrieved 27 December 2023. http://projects.buckinghamshum.net/compendiuminstitute/training/Compendium.Tutorial.v1.3.4.pdf ↩
Selvin, Albert M; Buckingham Shum, Simon J; Seirhuis, Maarten; Conklin, E Jeffrey; Zimmerman, Beatrix; Palus, Charles J; Drath, Wilfred H; Horth, David Magellan; Domingue, John; Motta, Enrico (March 2001). Compendium: making meetings into knowledge events (PDF) (Technical report). Milton Keynes: Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University. KMI-TR-103. https://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-01-6.pdf ↩
Conklin 2006; Zubizarreta 2006 - Conklin, E Jeffrey (2006). Dialogue mapping: building shared understanding of wicked problems. Chichester, UK; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0470017686. OCLC 60491946. https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/60491946 ↩
As described in Walton, Reed & Macagno 2008; to download the templates, see: "Argumentation schemes: compendium templates for critical thinking". compendium.open.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 22 January 2019. Retrieved 17 August 2018. - Walton, Douglas; Reed, Chris; Macagno, Fabrizio (2008). "Schemes in Compendium". Argumentation schemes. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 400. ISBN 9780521897907. OCLC 181424052. https://archive.org/details/argumentationsch0000walt/page/400 ↩
Buckingham Shum 2007a; Walton, Reed & Macagno 2008 - Buckingham Shum, Simon J (19 February 2007a). "Argumentation schemes: Compendium templates for critical thinking". Compendium Institute. Retrieved 11 January 2015. http://compendium.open.ac.uk/news/rostra/news.php@r=55&t=2&id=27.htm ↩
"Participating institutions". Compendium Institute. 2007. Archived from the original on 2 July 2020. Retrieved 11 January 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20200702120921/http://compendium.open.ac.uk/institutions.htm ↩
"CompendiumNG wiki". CompendiumNG. 2017. Retrieved 22 February 2017. https://github.com/CompendiumNG/CompendiumNG/wiki ↩