InfoRapid - revisited

Posted by PIMfan
May 29, 2016 at 07:37 PM

In a storm of (US) holiday weekend web surfing, I re-bumped (is that a word?) into InfoRapid KnowledgeBase today. I noticed that version 1.0 was mentioned here way back in 2013 (http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4731/5), but it had not been mentioned here since.

The URL I visited is http://www.buildyourmap.com/. http://www.inforapid.de/html/knowledgemapeng.htm can also get you there.

The current version is 4.5 and it looks like it has seen some nice improvements since version 1.0. The update log on the left side of the site page is quite extensive and shows a regular and steady update stream.

There is a “Create MindMaps of Unlimited Size” tab under Videos that showed a couple of notable features:

1) At 2:01, the video shows the ability to use a “Wikipedia” search mode. While Wikidedia certainly does qualify as an academic/peer-reviewed data source, I can see this functionality as a useful mode for quickly building a concept map structure that includes basic information without the need to separately copy/paste initial top level information.

2) At 3:24, the video demonstrates functionality that I’ve not seen before. After creating a node that has associated text note data, you can select a “related node addition” mode. In this mode, InfoRapid creates an associated node on the diagram for each concept in the text notes that is then selected.

The above feature #2 has me quite intrigued. In the other mindmap/concept map tools I’ve used, I’ve had to create a separate related concept node manually, and then relate the two. Even Via this feature of InfoRapid, I can instead scan through the text of a node I’ve imported and quickly select the related concepts to include on my diagram. In this way, I can focus on identifying important related concepts and put my energy into describing the relationships between them. I’ve found the amount of effort to add semantic annotation to information management tools to be more work than I care for, and this approach seems to be a nice solution….