Thanks for the thoughts. Many valid areas of exploration in there. I’d be interested in exploring any of the approaches you suggest, however; I’m hoping that if you don’t get too deep into the details, that there is one generic description of a system that might be used to approach the various specific needs that you specified. You may be right, and there are just so many specific needs, that no one tool, could possibly address all that is necessary, for any given task. My hope is that there is a lot of common ingestion, digestion, excretion mechanism that supports a lot of the more specialized processes that you have specified. Maybe one small module needs to be tweaked to make the system handle each particular requirement.
I’m trying to formulate a picture of a system that would help me process idea discovery and understanding. I listed a number of sources of concepts, projects, possibly related thoughts in my first post. I guess I’m seeking pointers to any type of system that would allow input, processing, manipulation, and output in various formats.
I’m assuming that if there does exist such a system, that someone is already charging a lot of money for it and government agencies or corporate research departments are using it to make even more money. I assume IBM’s Watson might be such a system, although I know nothing about it, except what they used to show, on their TV commercials. Their marketing made it look pretty powerful.
I’m seeking to find, or create, something that I can understand and afford to interact with. It’s my very strong belief, that we are not utilizing the computer processing power that is available to us these days. I just got a couple of new cell phones for me and my wife. They have an Octa-core (what ever that is - think it means 8 cores) CPU, 12GB RAM, 256GB storage (flash). Not to mention GPU and all the stuff to do with communications. That just blows my mind, and I know it’s no where near the top end, just for phones, these days.
There used to be a web site named brainspace.com. As far as I can tell, the functionality that I remember, no longer exists. It was kind of like a search engine, but would gather information based on sample input. You could provide keywords, or a sample paragraph or web page, and it would attempt to locate similar documents, web sites, etc. I think it was hosted by a company whose business is providing discovery tools for lawyers. I believe their product is still available for purchase, if you can afford it. Again, I don’t really know what it does.
Refind.com seems to be doing an interesting thing around, selecting a few interesting article suggestions, based on areas of interest. You can upload your bookmark collection and I guess they use that information as a starting point, in some way. I’m not sure if they know what they are trying to create, or are just making it up as they go along. It seems to be getting more feature rich as time goes on. It’s interesting to see it evolve.
Deepstash.com says: Discover, Create & Share Inspiring Ideas. Deepstash brings you key ideas from the most inspiring online sources. Join us for free to read more, save what inspires you & remember everything. I’m not sure I really get what they are trying to do, but it kind of seems like a similar, help organize and make sense of things, kind of approach.
I’m very interested in some kind of drag 'n drop, or outline manipulation, or mind map drawing/editing component, or a range of predefined functions which could be triggered in some way to manipulate the ideas/thoughts/nodes in the system.
I’m not sure if any of this makes any sense. I’m just trying to put into words some of the many thoughts that keep bouncing around in my head.
Is the universal thinking tool, actually a discussion forum?