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

High-tech solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend a notebook, and a pencil.

try a book

[JackBuckley]

I don't mean this as flamebait, but how about keeping a medium-sized notebook with you all the time. As a professor and researcher, I have found that nothing works better than an "idea book" for keeping notes from reading, paper ideas, sketches, equations, proofs, diagrams, etc., all together.

I have a small notebook (between 3x5 and 8.5x11) that I keep in my briefcase to and from work and jot everything down in it. It never crashes, it takes only seconds to include complex graphs or equations (no equation editor or LaTeX tags needed!), and can even be backed up via xerox (which I have done with ripped pages--just staple the copied page back in!).

MindManager by Mindjet

[Bazouel]

Have a look at Mind Manager by Mindjet.

I use it regularly and I'm still finding new uses for it. It's *very* easy to use yet powerful.

todo.txt as recommended at ETCON

[quiddity]

life hacks notes by cory doctorow (more at bottom)
"It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine."
"Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more forgiiving.
Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and win and *nix.
Geeks will try the Brain, etc, but they want to stay in text."

Re:Personal Brain

[__past__]

Why should one come up with a new one when there already are plenty XML formats that can be used for knowledge organization, like XML Topic Maps and RDF?

Re:Personal Brain

[jdclucidly]

The problem is that information is rarely heirarchial and XML only serves to force us in to making it be stored heirarchially. Information is more like a web of relationships. In graph theory, this is a simple, connected graph.