OpenSource Alternative to TheBrain?

m1cajah asks: "Been scouring the Net for an open-source alternative to The Brain. Specifically, I'm interested in a web version to use for creating a small intranet/portal site at my company. Does one exist out there? I've looked at some of the mind-mapping stuff out there and what's available just isn't as elegant, easy to use, or intuitive as TheBrain. TheBrain has a web-version called "SiteBrain" but it's cost is WAY too high for our little company (only 15 of us) and requires far too much "consultation" to make it work. Does anyone know of a nice alternative?"

Comments

A couple of alternatives

[Will Sargent]

There are a bunch of java graphing tools around if you don't mind hacking them a bit. Some are more useful than others, of course.

One interesting one is TouchGraph, best known for the google set vista.

Plumb Design also has the Visual Thesaurus, which is cool looking even if it's not really practical.

use a Wiki...

[metacosm]

I personally would recommend using a Wiki. It does all the jazz about connecting resources without contaniers and natural linking information. It does it more naturally as well. I am guessing that someone could write a plugin for any wiki system todo the pointless little map of information with little lines on it -- but I am not sure what purpose it would serve. I don't see what little GUI tool adds that a hyperlink (as a wiki would do it) wouldn't?

That is my recommendation. www.openwiki.com

TheBrain UI is patented

[Anonymous Coward]

If you find an open source version, you might want to warn them that TheBrain UI is patented (6,031,537).

Re:use a Wiki... yeah!

[khodsden]

I agree with the wiki suggestion. They're very easy to use, encourage everyone to participate, and (usually) have revision control in case someone messes up.

That said, they can also be very chaotic. If you aren't careful with how you organize your pages, they can become unwieldy. Of course, so can using the Brain. Fortunately, reorganizing a wiki structure is easy (if time consuming).

That said, if IIS & ASP don't work for you, look into other flavors of wikis. For example:

1. TWiki for a perl cgi-bin based wiki
   
2. phpwiki for a php based wiki
   
3. jspwiki
   
4. even palmWiki!
   

Lots of choices!

Dia is a free graph prog like visio

[Tril]

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/

Yes, it's been done

[drew_kime]

I am guessing that someone could write a plugin for any wiki system todo the pointless little map of information with little lines on it

Take a look here and here and here. Someday I'll have the time to start digging into these more.

Re:use a Wiki (and/or other software)... yeah!

[Rademir]

Usemod is another popular wiki, and there are dozens more WikiEngines, many of them licensed open/free.

There's also the book, The Wiki Way.

You could probably build something on top of Zope (which comes with a ZWiki component), and might find a href="http://www.gzigzag.org/

Proper wiki etc. info (public embarrassment)

[Rademir]

Please ignore the last paragraph of my last comment.

. o O ( Preview button...oh, yeah! )

You could probably build something on top of Zope (which comes with a ZWiki component), and might find gZigZag interesting.

Tinderbox, and Userland's products, though not open/free, are two other platforms to build on or learn from.

Re:use a Wiki... yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the squeak smalltalk Swiki

It's probably one of the more feature complete ones out there, and essentially comes with it's own development environment, the Smalltalk system that runs it...
You can use the swiki tools themselves, or the Squeak Server Pages extension too.

It's a breeze to set up and run, and it's easy to maintain.

Swiki.net is a website offering free swiki hosts using Squeak Swiki as the back end.