On Mind-mapping.org this week there are four new entries in the master list - three graphical and one a related development platform.

bCisive

bCisive is software for business decision making and diagramming.  It supports building and communicating business cases as well as documenting the reasoning behind decisions.

GenIE & SMILE

GeNIe is a user-friendly development environment for graphical decision-theoretic models. It is the Windows user interface to SMILE, which is a portable library of C++ classes implementing the models.

Outliner 2.0

Outliner is an outliner for mobile phones and PDAs.  It lets you create your outlines with desktop software and import them.

Vic

http://www.mind-mapping.org/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software

I really liked a slideshow that comes from a group at the Open University, UK, so I did a write-up to alert like-minded thinkers.  It’s about different forms of visualizing information, knowledge, argument, debate and evidence.  I’ve done a quick write up in my Seminal papers in information mapping section of mind mapping articles.

Favourite moment? This provocative (but I maybe not-too-serious) idea for the search engines:

 It’s called Knowledge Mapping for Open Sensemaking Communities

Vic

Last weekend, I though I’d pretty well cleared the decks for a while in the search to report information mapping software.  Wrong again.   

Protégé-Frames - This is the main component of Stanford University’s Protégé knowledge modeller.  It supports  a knowledge model which is compatible with the Open Knowledge Base Connectivity protocol (OKBC).   It was originally developed to model knowledge in biomedicine, but it is now used in many diverse areas such as intelligence gathering, and corporate modeling.

Protégé OWL - Protégé OWL was made as an extension of Protégé to support OWL.  OWL stands for Web Ontology Language and is one of the components of the Sematic Web.  Anyone who wonders why OWL is not called WOL clearly has not read Christopher Robin.

Debatemapper - Debatemapper is a free web-based tool for collaboratively modelling and evaluating debates and joins several other argument-mapping tools on mind-mapping.org.

Bookvar - This is mind mapping software at the “almost-Beta” stage at present – it also requires a Beta version of MS .Net so it’s only for the brave.  It’s desktop software but has a shared mode for collaboration via connected computers and supports publication on a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

Vic

I fell behind with getting new information mapping tools that I knew of into mind-mapping.org, so here’s the catch-up: Six new tools, and very interesting ones they are. 

This week’s entries are heavy on the development side.  The first four are to help developers build software that produces information maps, then one that helps web publishers turn mind maps into websites, and finally one that lets you present the pros and cons of a discussion visually.

Graph Gear - This provides Javascript and Flash scripts to help developers build these force-directed graphs - you know, the kind that wobble as you drag a node around.

JSViz - Javascript code to build network graphs.  You’ve probably seen these used to map out a website. I had one for mind-mapping.org once . . . now where did I put it . . .

JGraph -A Java library that can produce a most flexible series of diagram types.  There is an open source version and there are commercial products for developers who have to earn a living.

I usuually pick just one thumbnail to represent a product’s style.  This one has so many possibilities that a mere three hardly begins to show the range. 

MxGraph - A Javascript library to help developers make browser-based diagrams.

TransLucid - This is a content management system (CMS) with a twist: It takes you from mindmaps to websites, automatically.  It has open source and commercial versions.

Argunet - Collaborative debate and visual argument presentation and analysis.

And finally, a note about terms: I’ve been using web-based as a description for many months now for products that are mostly accessed on the web, rather than being desktop products.  Some if the new programs above are libraries that developers can use to build their own products, and they build on web-browsers’ capabilities instead of including all the functionality in the mapping software itself.  When you see the description browser-based on mind-mapping.org, you’ll know that this is not just another term for web-based. Instead it means a product implemented in a web-browser.  The value of such products is that they are Operating System (OS) independent.

I believe that web-based software makers are going to have to produce ways of running those locally in a browser eventually, so this distinction will probably disappear eventually.

Vic