Idea Management/Navigation Software?

psychonaut asks: "My work involves a lot of research and writing, and I often find myself jotting down brief notes on scraps of paper, in text files, in the margin of books, etc. The idea is to later use these ideas as the basis for various papers or even books I plan to write. However, because I have no central repository for all these ideas, finding long-forgotten thoughts and citations months after I've recorded them becomes a nightmare. Can anyone recommend an open source knowledge management, visualization, and navigation software I could use to bring together and classify all these disjointed ideas?"

"The system should be hypertext-based, allowing explicit links between nodes, but it would be nice if it could also derive some relations on its own. Having built-in support for referencing web links, printed publications (BibTeX integration?), and arbitrary files would be great. Text-based and perhaps also non-text-based searching capabilities (e.g., graphical visualization of node relationships) would also be very useful.

I've looked at some wiki systems but the choices seem overwhelming, and most of them are geared towards collaborative rather than individual work. Is there some wiki or database system that does what I need, or should I be looking for something in an entirely different paradigm?"

Comments

I Have A Hideously Bad Idea...

[X-wes]

If you don't care how crude this idea is, you could try this out:

Take all of the scraps you write, and spend a bit of time making 75-100 DPI scans of them. Place all of the images into a folder for "notes" and such. Inside this folder, categorise all the files by using folders/directories.

This does not meet the requirements you set out; and like I said, it's horribly crude. However, it is simple to implement and can easily be combined with any web server software to form an easily accessible knowledge base.

Being a student, this is the system I use to categorise my notes and papers. It is simply not the best system, but it rarely gets any simpler than this.

Hope this was at least slightly interesting.

Emacs is what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure it has what you want somewhere in it.

Re:Bite your pride

[orthogonal]

Rather than going Microsoft, maybe you should use freemind. I've been using it the last six months on Linux and Windows, and am very pleased with it.

Now I know nothing about Freemind beyond what I saw following the parent post's link, but the when front page of the site asks, "Did FreeMind make you angry?" you really have to wonder.