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General Knowledge Base vs Ask Sam vs Idea
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Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 20, 2008 at 06:03 PM
Stephen, I am fortunate b/c the material is in my field so I can quickly set the structure, all the more so when cloning allows for multiple appearances of the same thing—the structure need not be perfect, and I do not have to obsess. I do not have to obsess. I do not have to obsess. I do not…. Anyhow, you get my point.
I have tried a number of mind map programs—recently got MindGenius as I noted her a few months ago.
On a slightly different front, am trying to determine whether a mind map or a concept map is the best way for me to set up a knowledge base on brain structure and function. Any thoughts. I do know that visual is key to remembering and getting the over-view of an ever-dynamic process with more feedback loops and detours than an interstate highway construction process in the midst of an urban freeway system.
There is a program called Recall Plus that is, I think, a more refined attempt to do what SuperMemo attempts.
Also, in the analogue world, immediate and spontaneous use of index cards for anything—with no prior sense of classifying anything—is a very powerful modality in this whole process.
What are you using these days for idea processing and management—because it always seems you’re into fairly complex, conceptually oriented material of a legal and/or philosophical bent.
Daly
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
>Daly,
>
>I thought that by this morning I would remember the name of the program, but it
>still eludes me. In principle it sounds to me like what you are doing is a perfect task
>for that German multi-dimensional outliner that you used to like.
>
>One thing to
>consider is whether you will build an organization _out of_ the documents, or you will
>impose an organization _on_ them. If you can pretty much figure out what the
>categories should be beforehand, it will probably be most efficient first to create
>the structure. You might want to use an outline processor or mind mapper to determine
>the structure. I think that Idea! is more convenient than UltraRecall, when you have
>an a priori structure. Again, that German multi-dimensional product _sounds_
>ideal, although I haven’t used it.
>
>Considering the pressure, probably Ultra
>Recall is the way to go. I think the New Year’s poll in this forum supports it as an
>excellent general purpose organizer. Note that I haven’t used it for some time.
Posted by Derek Cornish
Jan 20, 2008 at 06:21 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I have some experience with AskSam. I’ve owned a license from
>version 3.0 through the current version. I love the concept of AskSam: Free form data
>—just dump it in and find it later.
Bob Mackreth wrote:
>I uninstalled my paid-for copy of AskSam 5, reinstalled 4.1, and have never bothered upgrading since. I still have AskSam >installed for access to my legacy databases, but have not added to them in years.
Couldn’t agree more with Steve and Bob. I’ve been playing with askSam since its DOS days, but stopped at v5. Each year I’m tempted by the concept to upgrade further (the always seem to have a Christmas/New Year sale) but I just don’t trust askSam’s developers and support enough. Is v7 beta looking any better?
Derek
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 20, 2008 at 06:36 PM
Derek, I don’t know the product well enough to say for sure whether the bet looks better than what has gone before.
It seems to me a little more user friendly.
But don’t take my word for it.
Beta comes in 30-day free installments, the rationale being that within each 30-day block there’s be a new beta version to download.
Daly
Derek Cornish wrote:
>
>
>Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>
>>I have some experience with AskSam. I’ve owned a license
>from
>>version 3.0 through the current version. I love the concept of AskSam: Free
>form data
>>—just dump it in and find it later.
>
>Bob Mackreth wrote:
>
>>I
>uninstalled my paid-for copy of AskSam 5, reinstalled 4.1, and have never bothered
>upgrading since. I still have AskSam >installed for access to my legacy databases,
>but have not added to them in years.
>
>Couldn’t agree more with Steve and Bob. I’ve been
>playing with askSam since its DOS days, but stopped at v5. Each year I’m tempted by the
>concept to upgrade further (the always seem to have a Christmas/New Year sale) but I
>just don’t trust askSam’s developers and support enough. Is v7 beta looking any
>better?
>
>Derek
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 20, 2008 at 06:49 PM
I just realize I did not mention my Info. Am not sure why that is.
I know that lack of hoist is one part of it.
And MyInfo doesn’t play as nicely on the usb stick.
Also not crazy about its web capture capability.
But…should I be considering it as a possible program for what I am doing?
BTW, thanks to everyone who’s let me pick their brain this morning. I sure appreciate it.
Daly
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 20, 2008 at 08:31 PM
Daly,
I was going to ask if you had considered MyInfo. I confess to not using it myself, even though I like a lot about it. I recently upgraded to the new, portable version with the intention of making it my portable data manager—then I found I couldn’t import CSV data into it. That is, I wanted to import records with some of the fields filling in column values in MyInfo… seems like a reasonable thing to want to do, but I couldn’t do it. Nevertheless, in the past, when I did use MI more frequently, I found it handled imbedded PDF and Word documents pretty well.
Steve Z.