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In my opinion, FreeMind is the best solution currently out there because of forces mindmapping conventions and places a strong emphasis on folding. A lot of oth

In my opinion, FreeMind is the best solution currently out there because of forces mindmapping conventions and places a strong emphasis on folding. A lot of other solutions I've seen are more like concept maps, which are great for project management, but not great for knowledge bases. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page (The one thing of note is that there is a bug in the default version of OS X Java, so it frequently crashes unless you update to Java 8 and edit the config to use that version of Java.)

zzzmarcus 11y ago
Freemind is great for mindmapping in the context of a specific topic or project, but isn't a general purpose knowledgebase. A mindmap starts at a central node and moves outward. This makes it limited in the practical number of nodes you can have--anything over a couple hundred is hard to manage. It also makes it difficult for one node to appear in multiple places within the mindmap.
jpfed 11y ago
>A lot of other solutions I've seen are more like concept maps, which are great for project management, but not great for knowledge bases. I've never understood this preference; would you be willing to explain it? It seems almost exactly backward to me: I model tasks as trees of sub-tasks, and knowledge as a general graph of connected concepts.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  So all knowledge can be seen as connected, but all knowledge can also be put into hierarchies. Concepts and how those concepts are related is something that people come up with, rather than being an inherent property of the universe. The idea of forcing yourself to put knowledge into hierarchies is that it makes your thinking more clear, makes it easier to remember where things are, and perhaps paradoxically makes it easier to see how things are related. (Or at least highlights certain types of relationships that are only visible in the context of hierarchies.) I'll admit it's pretty weird at first to only get one root node, I think it took me a couple years to get used to that. But once I embraced it the benefits quickly became clear.

zzzmarcus 11y ago

Freemind is great for mindmapping in the context of a specific topic or project, but isn't a general purpose knowledgebase. A mindmap starts at a central node and moves outward. This makes it limited in the practical number of nodes you can have--anything over a couple hundred is hard to manage. It also makes it difficult for one node to appear in multiple places within the mindmap.

jpfed 11y ago

>A lot of other solutions I've seen are more like concept maps, which are great for project management, but not great for knowledge bases. I've never understood this preference; would you be willing to explain it? It seems almost exactly backward to me: I model tasks as trees of sub-tasks, and knowledge as a general graph of connected concepts.

Alex3917 11y ago
So all knowledge can be seen as connected, but all knowledge can also be put into hierarchies. Concepts and how those concepts are related is something that people come up with, rather than being an inherent property of the universe. The idea of forcing yourself to put knowledge into hierarchies is that it makes your thinking more clear, makes it easier to remember where things are, and perhaps paradoxically makes it easier to see how things are related. (Or at least highlights certain types of relationships that are only visible in the context of hierarchies.) I'll admit it's pretty weird at first to only get one root node, I think it took me a couple years to get used to that. But once I embraced it the benefits quickly became clear.