Concept webs are hypermedia documents containing definitions and discussions of the key concepts of a subject, internally linked according to conceptual structure and also linked to examples and to other related material, including such things as animations, simulations, experiments, interactive database searches, etc. The potential uses of concept webs are many, in education, research, and commercial enterprise. The World Wide Web currently provides an excellent medium for dissemination of concept webs; cooperative development of concept webs is also supported reasonably well.
One large existing Web site that shows a lot of the potential of concept webs (though its author doesn't use that term) is SGI's Standard Template Library (STL) documentation, which makes extensive use of concept definitions and refinement in documenting the requirements and properties of a set of standard algorithms and data structures. See
where I've added a graphical representation of a major part of SGI's pages, with links into the pages.http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~musser/STL_concept_web,
The STL documentation example is an excellent but imperfect example of concept webs as I currently see them being developed as a means of informating academic and commercial disciplines.1 Indeed, we should probably recognize that concept webs will never be perfect; they can always be revised and extended, but in the educational context this is a virtue, not a drawback. For example, the STL Web pages are static, but there are lots of possibilities for making them active (and interactive). The Web pages for particular algorithms in the STL Web pages could for example contain animations of the algorithms. They don't currently, but one can see good examples of such animations in the separate SGI Java Algorithm Demo site. Developing such active content is an area where students could be heavily involved.
The SGI example and the example of generic programming concepts developed in this document are heavily computer science-oriented, but the idea of hypermedia concept descriptions and refinement hierarchies can be applied to any subject area.