The Comprehand approach has shown its applicability as a means for cooperative articulation and negotiation of knowledge in many different educational and industrial use cases. Deployment of Comprehand, however, is tied to the availability of the costly and bulky Comprehand hardware components.

Rural Comprehand aims at making the methodolgy available to a wider range of application areas. It minimizes the the technological effort of deploying Comprehand while at the same time preserving as many features of the original toolset as possible.
 
Currently, the newly designed hardware components of Rural Comprehand are available. For testing purposes and to gain data for the development of the software components, we provide early access to the materials.
 
Rural Comprehand consists of a set of 60 distinct modeling cards and a reusable modeling surface. Additionally, non-permanent markers and a digital photo camera is required.
 
The cards are used to describe the concepts relevant for the current modeling topic (e.g. activities, actors, ...). The different colors can be used to distinguish different classes of concepts.
 
The cards are put into mutual relationship by placing them on the modeling surface and connecting them by drawing lines. The special texture of the surface allows these lines to be altered or removed.
 
Whenever a modeling step has been completed (i.e. whenever a model state seems to be relevant to be captured), a photo of the surface should be taken. Visibility of at least three of the markers at the border of the modeling surface have to be visible on each picture. The pictures will then be imported in the Comprehand online portal, where picture analysis will be performed. In this way, the model itself as well as its creation history will be made accessible not only a images but as a conceptual structure that can be semantically enriched and extended.