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Idea Management/Navigation Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the organizing-your-random-thoughts dept.

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?"

5 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Personal Brain by dFaust · · Score: 3, Interesting
    It's not open source, and you do have to sign up to download it (just username and email, I think... and I've been on their list for years and only get maybe 2 emails a year from them)... but it is free and it's a pretty nifty piece of software, allowing you to make large webs of thoughts, relate any node to any other node, link files & emails, etc.

    If you're running Windows, it's at least worth checking out. http://www.thebrain.com

    1. Re:Personal Brain by bergeron76 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why doesn't the Open Source community come up with a common XML foundation for information organization and design toward it?

      Seriously, by starting with VERY BASIC meta tags (NAME, KEYWORD, DESCRIPTION) we could exponentially expand the productivity of OpenOffice, etc...

      The KEY (no pun intended), however, is going to be linking these features among different apps. I can't even count how many times I've done a "locate project | grep png" and NEVER found the image that I was looking for.

      Unity is key...

      --
      Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
  2. Palm Piece by angst_ridden_hipster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I use Memo Plus on the Palm, which is merely a hierarchical notepad.

    I have things sorted into a hierarchy that works for me.

    But oh, how I would love a cross-platform product that offered deep integration with email, address book, bookmarks, calendar, and random notes, with multiple hierarchical and/or directed graph maps, and good search capabilities. In my fantasy world, it'd run on my PC and on my Kyocera smart phone, and would be compatible with stuff on both ends: Firefox, Thunderbird, the Palm address book, etc. If I didn't have a job, that's what I'd be building right now...

    --
    Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
    www.fogbound.net
  3. Idea Management by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If you have not seen this program, Check it out. It is a mature product, not open source however http://web.singnet.com.sg/~axon2000/index.htm

  4. Review page of Windows outliners by Grabble · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some people think The One True Way is to use outliners. (shrug) It depends on your work style.

    This really useful page...

    http://john.redmood.com/organizers.html

    ... lists a bunch of Windows outliners, along with personal opinion on usage and features.

    I have been in your exact shoes and have installed Twiki and have the following generalization...

    Wiki's aren't as easy to use as they seem. When using a wiki, there's actually a very distinct (but non-obvious) obstacle course between the urge to write and the actual start of writing and it negatively impacts your productivity more than you realize.

    ... but that's just a generalization from my own experience. I'm still a believer, but not a user.

    "Someday, I'll fix it."

    Extra comments: Jot + serves me well as a catch-all sort of scratchpad... I'm only an Alt-Tab away from writing, and I also like its indentation model.

    The folks behind The Brain are patent fuckwads... they actually patented the idea of using lines to connect thoughts. Avoid them.