History and Motivation

Initial Development

Compendium NG (abbreviated as CNG) is built upon Compendium, which was developed by a group at what is now Verizon. It grew out of the “Conversational Modeling” methodology developed in the mid-1990s by Al Selvin and Maarten Sierhuis at NYNEX Science & Technology, NY. The first Compendium Java software was developed there in the late 1990s, then licensed to the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at The Open University UK in 2001. The Open University group continued to develop the software over the next decade. However, the history of CNG does not end here as the work by Al Selvin and colleagues were building on the concept of Dialogue Mapping and the CM/1 Windows application developed by Jeff Conklin (at the time at Corporate Memory Systems, now at CogNexus). CM/1 was a commercial Windows product, from the influential gIBIS prototype developed by Conklin at MCC Labs, Austin TX, in the late 1980s. To find out more about the history of Compendium read Al Selvin’s blog series tracing back the history of the origins of Compendium and its predecessors to the early 1990’s in detail.

Why ? … our Motivation

During our search of a diagramming tools that would be more flexible than usual mind-mapping application we found only few that didn’t limit its’ features to mind mapping but brought its’ own idea about diagraming complex issues. One of them was Compendium designed for dialog mapping based on the IBIS notation. Compendium expressiveness allows to diagram complex issues and in a way supersedes traditional mind-mapping by not forcing users into strict hierarchical mapping. On top of it, while based on IBIS notation it can be used more generally and it has some unique features not seen in other similar applications. For many users Compendium was a software of choice for various tasks and from our point of view an application with such unique features set should be further developed and improved.

In 2009 The Open University and Verizon released Compendium as Open Source under the the LGPL license. However, in 2012, Compendium development was in a state where developement looked stalled. We therefore decided to continue the Compendium development, to fix bugs and improve it. For this we migrated software development to a GitHub repository and set up this project site. CompendiumNG (short CNG) now continues the development of Compendium. Our main motivation was to renew and revive the development of Compendium. With the development of CompendiumNG we are trying to bring a great software back to life and we hope that the usage and the CompendiumNG community will further grow into the future.