The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) project at Tufts UIT Academic Technology is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. Using VUE's concept mapping interface, faculty and students design semantic networks of digital resources drawn from digital libraries, local and remote file systems, and the Web. The resulting content maps can then be viewed and exchanged online.
Announcing the release of VUE 2.1!
The VUE team is pleased to announce the release of VUE 2.1! VUE 2.1 represents a significant evolution of VUE’s pathways metaphor resulting in new set of tools for visualizing maps and creating nonlinear presentations. The purpose of this functionality is to provide VUE map authors with additional tools for communicating the information and ideas contained within their VUE content maps. VUE 2.1 also introduces new semantic tools for analyzing a collection of maps and for creating new maps based on predefined ontologies. Visit the User Guide section to view short video clips highlighting these new features.
DOWNLOAD
VUE is now compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Linux and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Please read the VUE 2.1 release notes for important information about the features and functionality of this release.
We hope the tool you will be downloading today will become a useful support for your needs, spanning research, collaboration, planning, teaching, presenting, studying, organizing content and general visual thinking.
NEW FEATURES AT A GLANCE:
Enhanced Pathways Tool Ontologies
Authors may now import ontologies defined in RDF-S or OWL formats directly into VUE, allowing for the creation of concept maps from pre-defined object and relationship types. A defined mapping vocabulary scaffolds map creation and supports computer-assisted map comparison and assessment.
Merge Maps
The merge maps tool enables computer-assisted map comparison and assessment. VUE supports the merging of a set of maps into a single map and offers two modes for visualizing nodes and links that are shared across maps.
Connectivity Analysis
VUE 2.0 has the capability to generate connectivity matrices, which in turn can be imported into existing statistical packages for further analysis.
Publish to repositories
Make your maps available to others by uploading them to digital repositories / libraries or LMS systems on which you have an account and /or publishing priviledges. Publishing to Fedora and Sakai are currently supported.
Resources (formerly datasources)
You can now search multiple digital repositories and collections simultaneously (and the web too!) using VUE. These resources, called OSIDs [learn more], are easy to install and allows you to add content and its medatata to your VUE maps. While most resources are accessible to all, some require a subscription or special configuration. Our latest resources include Wikipedia, Yahoo Search and PubMed.
New Keywords and Search tool
VUE 2.0 offers a revised keywords (metadata) and search tool. The Keywords tool enables authors to "tag" or apply full metadata schema to nodes and links. The search tool allows to query nodes and links in large maps. Search results can be highlighted, hidden, filtered or copied to a new map.
Interactive Zoom and Pruning
When presenting VUE maps, the interactive zoom tool allows the presenter to quickly zoom in and out of their map to focus on content while maintaing a sense of context. The Pruning tool presents a basic toggle element to allow users to collapse and expand branches of nodes.
COMING UP SOON!
Available early summer 2008, a new feature on the VUE website will allow users to publish their maps to the VUE Digital Library. Maps will be published from within VUE directly to the VUE Digital Library. Stay tuned for more information!
FEEDBACK
The VUE team would like to thank an enthusiastic community of users who have put VUE 2.0 to test during its alpha and beta phases and provided us with invaluable feedback.
If you have questions or comments, or if you are interested in contributing to the development of VUE, please send inquiries to vue@elist.tufts.edu. We encourage you to post feedback and bug report to the Forums section of this site, so other users can benefit from comments and answers.