OKM is a visual knowledge discovery tool that provides an overview of a research field based on available metadata and abstracts of relevant articles. The full technical implementation and code are openly available (Kraker et al., 2017). The authors furthermore have published a piece about currently implemented as well as planned features (Kraker, Kittel and Enkhbayar, 2016). While the basic search functionality resembles other standard academic search engines, the results are presented in an interactive form which the authors call knowledge map. These knowledge maps consist of individual items (publications) and topic bubbles which are calculated based on the available metadata abstracts of the items (see fig. 2). The concept of knowledge maps is reminiscent of Rosch’s prototypes (Rosch, 1988) or Wittgenstein’s family resemblance (Wittgenstein, 1953), which is one of the reasons why I initially started to look into Wittgenstein's work as a theoretical foundation.
We have now successfully replaced an “elevator word” by a concrete piece of technology. We can finally reformulate the previous question as: How can we bridge the gap between Wittgenstein and Open Knowledge Maps?