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I think it’s time for us to be able to organize our information in an intuitive and natural manner - to use the way we are thinking visually, in symbols, rather than in plain text stream.

I wish to be able to take the some metadata about an item [article, images, …], to relate the item to others and to be able to view and manipulate all this information in a graph view.


Let’s take biographic data.

I wanted to find a tool to organize bibliographic data.

Requirements - to allow to:
- describe a document

- categorise a document
- associate a file and/or URL (full text) with a document

- add interesting quotes (text excerpts) to the document information
- add relations (references) to/from other documents

- view and navigate relations


Ideally that would be a graphical tool that allowes to navigate the document relations in a graph form, view the graph in various views and explore its clustering.

I looked at EndNote and was disappointed - seems that its not much more than a library card storage system with the ability to format the cards in various formats and access bibliographic databases.


Regarding bibliography databases I can find the information I need in the CiteSeer and DBLP.


What I really need is an intiutive graphical interface to the documents and their relations.

The wish for graphical represenation is somewhat related to MindMapping [1,2,3].

At the time when I looked at TheBrain [4,5,6] software, its look & feel was very similar to what I’d like to see in such a graphical tool. Non-prorietary and open-source is preferable of course.


If it were not for easy, graphical navigation, the Wiki Way seems like an acceptable way to organize references. At least it can do what’s required, though transforming the documents and their relations into the Wiki markup would be quite time consuming unless it can be automated.


I have not found such a tool for reference data, but there’s always a possibility that somebody has already found one or made it.


MindMapping
[1] MindMapping @ C2 Wiki

[2] MindMapping @ WikiPedia
[3] MM resource at the MindManager site

TheBrain
[4] TheBrain site

[5] TheBrain @ C2 Wiki

[6] Slashdot | OpenSource Alternative to TheBrain?