Organising knowledge

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Posted by Wojciech
Aug 14, 2006 at 01:07 PM

Daly,

My recent post leads me to the following observation. After experimenting with various outliners discussed here I believe that there is no one Swiss knife for all my needs. Of course, I learnt about some very nice and useful programs, indeed. For example UltraRecall and NetSnippets work fine for some of my projects. However, in most cases learning how to use new programs/options/features, importing/exporting or inserting data, browsing/searching through several databases actually takes more time than using my old simple solutions. And they are:
- for small pieces of information, especially gathered from the Internet, and small junks of text from various documents: netXtract and its KBase Manager;
- for whole documents, especially PDF files (I have thousands of them): I save them in a rather simple thus clear (at least for me…) tree of folders, and when I need I use Research Assistant to create specific topics (actually, virtual folders).
One more thing I need to make this system work is a program for assigning multiply categories (or keywords, or tags) to particular files. Do you think InfoHandler would be the best for it?

Wojciech

Posted by Daly de Gagne
Aug 15, 2006 at 05:32 AM

Wojciech, I think that InfoHandler probably fits that bill better than anything else on the market.

I checked out the Research Assistant program you mentioned, and saw that you could use up to three keywords in one search; most programs limit you to one keyword.

InfoHandler allows you, on the other hand, to use many keywords in combination.

That means you could select for all writings of Freud in the 10 years before his death dealing with the countertransference in light of critiques from his contemporaries, specifically Jung and Adler.

If your infobase has, for example, 300 articles on Freud, it is nice to be able to use that kind of precision in retrieving exactly what you need. IH allows you to highlight text in a variety of colours (so you can set up your own colour coding system), so when you open any of the retrieved infoitems you can see the highlighting right away, and I find that helpful.

Of course, at the front end, you need to take some time assigning categories. There is an auto-cat feature that will do some of that, but the manual process is still there.

At first I thought it was a pain, but now appreciate it because it means I have to do an initial read of my infoitem, and develop an understanding of what is there. That, I find, pays off later in terms of my awareness of what I have, but also as an aid to fueling the processes of analysis and integration that go on outside of our awareness, and which lead to some of the insights and aha moments that make intellectual work exciting.

Daly

Wojciech wrote:
>Daly,
> >My recent post leads me to the following observation. After experimenting
>with various outliners discussed here I believe that there is no one Swiss knife for
>all my needs. Of course, I learnt about some very nice and useful programs, indeed. For
>example UltraRecall and NetSnippets work fine for some of my projects. However, in
>most cases learning how to use new programs/options/features,
>importing/exporting or inserting data, browsing/searching through several
>databases actually takes more time than using my old simple solutions. And they
>are:
>- for small pieces of information, especially gathered from the Internet, and
>small junks of text from various documents: netXtract and its KBase Manager;
>- for
>whole documents, especially PDF files (I have thousands of them): I save them in a
>rather simple thus clear (at least for me…) tree of folders, and when I need I use
>Research Assistant to create specific topics (actually, virtual folders).
>One
>more thing I need to make this system work is a program for assigning multiply
>categories (or keywords, or tags) to particular files. Do you think InfoHandler
>would be the best for it?
> >Wojciech

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 15, 2006 at 03:35 PM

Wojciech wrote:
>One more thing I need to make this system work is a program for assigning multiply
>categories (or keywords, or tags) to particular files. Do you think InfoHandler
>would be the best for it?

Wojciech,

Another option to consider, one that is far less sophisticated, but also less expensive, is Personal Knowbase, which allows you to assign any number of keywords to an item… items can be links to files. http://www.bitsmithsoft.com

Steve Z.

Posted by Wojciech
Aug 17, 2006 at 10:14 PM

Stephen,

Many thanks for that hint. I read the description on their homepage and found PK quite tempting. Nevertheless, I have a feeling that its main purpose is to link and cross-reference small bits of information. I am not sure how it works if a single item, say description of a research projects, has a hundred attachments - .doc and .pdf files. Well, I will check as soon as I can.

Thanks again,

Wojciech

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
> >Wojciech,
> >Another option to
>consider, one that is far less sophisticated, but also less expensive, is Personal
>Knowbase, which allows you to assign any number of keywords to an item… items can be
>links to files. http://www.bitsmithsoft.com
> >Steve Z.

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