Some principles and approaches to construction of group cognitive maps

One of the most important branches of cognitive-map-based tools development is constructing a cognitive map being an integrated model of knowledge by a group of experts. We survey the procedures for group maps construction suggested by leading theorists and practitioners and analyze the risks incurred by these techniques and their reliability. We show that a typical procedure of building a group map employs formal aggregation (averaging) of expert estimates with no analysis of experts’ points of view and no necessary reconciliation. We suggest a number of principles and routines to expert estimates’ reconciliation and clusterization, which result in a more reasonable opinion aggregation.