Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University

Cohere [http://cohereweb.net] is a new web-centric knowledge mapping tool from the Knowledge Media Institute’s Open Sensemaking Communities project, working as part of the OU-wide OpenLearn initiative:

Cohere enables learners, researchers and analysts to:

record ideas, and add relevant websites
make meaningful connections between ideas
visualize the emerging network of your ideas, and the world’s, in different ways
import social bookmark feeds from tools like del.icio.us, ready for connecting
share maps as weblinks, or embed them in other websites [example]

Cohere relates to Compendium, our established knowledge mapping tool (a standalone Java application), as follows:

Cohere is web-centric, so you can share maps much more easily, and it generates dynamic maps on the fly (in Compendium you craft every map manually). Cohere is specifically for crafting a layer of interpretations over the web information ocean.
Compendium still does lots of things you can’t do in Cohere: templates, tagging, stencils, rich maps, and user interface optimisation for real time mapping
You can upload Compendium XML maps to Cohere, so Compendium can be used as an offline tool for creating maps (for details see below); as established Compendium users, you may well find it a faster way to weave maps than the web interface.
Cohere is open-ended, providing default roles for IBIS-based Dialogue Mapping (Questions, Answers, Pros, Cons, etc) along with any other language of nodes+links ("ideas+connections"), although without Compendium’s layout options which are tuned to IBIS trees

Go to http://cohereweb.net to watch the welcome screencast, and try it out live!