Compendium

A compendium (plural: compendia) is a concise compilation of a body of knowledge. A compendium may summarize a larger work. In most cases the body of knowledge will concern a specific field of human interest or endeavour (for example: hydrogeology, logology, ichthyology, phytosociology or myrmecology), while a general encyclopedia can be referred to as a compendium of all human knowledge.

The word compendium arrives from the Latin word "compenso", meaning "to weigh together or balance". The 21st century has seen the rise of democratized, online compendia in various fields.

Examples

An example would be the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a concise 598-question-and-answer book which summarises the teachings of the Catholic Faith and Morals.

The Bible is another example of a compendium - a group of many writings of the prophets and apostles over a period of time, whose books are put together to form the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Some well known literary figures have written their own compendium. An example would be Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, and an enthusiastic gourmand. His compendium on food titled From Absinthe to Zest serves as an alphabet for food lovers.

Compendium (software)

Compendium is a computer program and social science tool that facilitates the mapping and management of ideas and arguments. The software provides a visual environment that allows people to structure and record collaboration as they discuss and work through 'wicked problems'.

The software is currently released by the not-for-profit Compendium Institute. The current version operationalises the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS), an argumentation mapping structure first developed by Horst Rittel in the 1970s. Compendium adds hypertext functionality and database interoperability to the issue-based notation derived from IBIS.

Compendium source code was fully released under LGPL licence on 13 January 2009.

Applications

Compendium visually represents thoughts and illustrates the various interconnections between different issues (or questions), ideas (or answers), and arguments. 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).

Compendium (disambiguation)

Compendium may refer to: