What do hieroglyphs, flowcharts, road signs, and knowledge graphs have in common? They’re all thinking maps. Humans have been thinking in maps since the very first symbolic communication systems.

“Thinking in maps is substantively different from thinking in sentences.”

Lascaux is home to something I find even more enthralling: one of the oldest known maps in the world. And it is a map of the skies, not the earth.

the oldest surviving map of the world (circa 600 BC) is symbolic, as opposed to literal.

Common visual symbols:

Pictogram. A symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object.
Ideogram. A graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of specific words or phrases.
Logogram. A written character that represents a word or phrase.

Beyond logograms, almost all cultures use pictograms in addition to their written language to communicate meaning.

When thinking in maps, word-maps (pictograms, ideograms, logograms and other visual symbols) are often amalgamated with world-maps (physical or mental space maps) to create visual representations of our knowledge, beliefs, or questions.

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519) is probably one of the most famous visual thinkers in history, with about 13,000 pages of notes and drawings combining art and natural philosophy.

“These are the principles for the development of a complete mind: study the science of art, study the art of science. Realise that everything connects to everything else,” Da Vinci wrote in one of his notes.

“One of the characteristics you will find of polymaths is that they see links where we see separations—for Leonardo everything is linked up.”

Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was another great map thinker, using diagrams to explore scientific concepts and research ideas.

mental maps as trees with a trunk and branches seem to be the oldest form of node-link diagrams.

In information science, an ontology is a formal representation and definition of the categories, properties and relationships between the concepts that make up an area of knowledge.

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.” — Tim Berners-Lee.

“While the indented tree visualisation is more organised and familiar to novice users, subjects found the graph visualisation to be more controllable and intuitive without visual redundancy, particularly  for  ontologies with multiple inheritance,” write Fu et al. in a 2013 study

“Consider a future device (…) in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory,” he writes in 1945, coining the term memex.

Whichever model prevails in the knowledge management quest, the next logical step seems to be the metamodeling of thinking in maps—a model made of a new language, a new schema for the semantic data constituting our thought processes.