DevonThink

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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 15, 2007 at 08:57 PM

The indexed search facility described in the article by Steve Johnson, which Manfred referenced, seems unique. It doesn’t rely on keywords or categories. It just searches for similar words or related words to pull up possibly related articles. This is great because it means you don’t have to add categories or keywords to your information as you’re assembling it, which to me is the biggest limitation of hierarchical and keyword systems.

Is there any knowledge management program in Windows that has this function?

Steve Z.

Posted by Manfred
Oct 16, 2007 at 03:33 AM

I have looked - really looked hard for a couple of years. But I haven’t found any, except Google perhaps ...

On the other hand, I have tried out Devonthink during the last month, and I am somewhat underwhelmed.

What Steven Berlin Johnson describes depends more on the fact that there are many short entries than on the fuzzy or semantic search, I think. It works just as well in the application I use on Windows. And I can tell because I transferred all of the more than 5000 entries I have (in the Windows application I frequently referred to in the past) into DevonThink and then searched it with DevonThink, fooled around with it, etc.

Any application with a powerful full text search will produce similar results (and, in my experience, especially if the entries are linked). When you look at the entries brought up by a search, and then see how they link to other stuff that you had forgotten or were remembering only vaguely, you may get the same experience as when you click in DevonThink on See also (Similar or Suggest in Google).

The usefulness of this kind of “serendipity” or “aleatoric” search really depends on what YOU have put in.

Manfred

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 16, 2007 at 06:50 PM

Manfred,

Thank you for your response. Also, I enjoyed reading your extensive essay about note-taking and Connected Text on the CT web site. Thanks, again.

Steve Z.

Posted by Manfred
Oct 17, 2007 at 12:07 AM

Steve,
you are welcome; and thanks for your kind words.
Manfred

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