I do not mean to be a pest about this but I really would like to be able to access my bibliographic database from within an outline. Think about it. Who more than a researcher gets more granular with ideas? An outliner is essential for all researchers except for those few who can store, organize, and recall lots of data in their heads. It would be simple enough in a relational database manager like MS Access to create a Publications table and link records therein to records in an Ideas or Issues table. The problem of course is that, as far as I know, MS Access does not implement an outline structure (but see Casemap, which is built on MS Acess and has a rudimentary outline [Issues] table).
Sciplore is a mindmapper, compatible with Freemind, that permits a bibliographic reference to be attached to a node. (www.sciplore.org) But unlike mindmanager it does not permit nesting of maps or focusing on nodes. The nodes quickly become too congested to use as a means of drilling down to the last child node. In other words you cannot visually follow your train of thought.
I have created a publications grid and an issues grid and have tried to relate records from the former to a issue in the latter, but I cannot make it work. Even if I could, as a researcher I would want to be able to click a button and have the software prepare a bibliography for me which sciplore does. It also searches pdf files and extracts bookmarks from them and imports them as a child nodes to the parent idea node.
Mitch Kastner
Comments
Clearly, no one approach to personal information management can do everything that everybody wants it to do. Therefore it's essential that we use the right tool for the right job. I had initially hoped that the concept mapping ("map view") that Pierre has introduced into InfoQube might mean that it would not be necessary to use a separate concept mapping software. However, it is as always a question of "horses for courses" as we used to say in England where I come from. And in a concept map as introduced by Joseph Novak, the links between items have names. In extended concept maps, both concept and the links may have types. InfoQube cannot know -- and therefore cannot show -- these extended semantics.
As concept mapping software, I am currently using a product from a French Canadian company which is not NeoTech Systems! I am using Mot+ from LICEF, qui est un des centres de recherche de la télé université du Québec à Montréal. The best known concept mapping software is called Cmap, but I prefer the Montréal-based approach (at least for now) because it insists on a greater semantic precision than does Cmap (Mot in Mot+ stands for "modélisation par objets typés", that is, modelling with typed objects). One of the things I really like about Mot+ is that it permits any object, or collection of objects to be grouped together to form the basis for another, linked, usually hierarchical, map. Thus the very well-known advantages of visual mapping of concepts become powerfully generalisable. Nevertheless, the place to do good information management, as I hope we all agree, is InfoQube.
The software I use to manage bibliographies and academic references is called Zotero. For me, its strengths lie in the fact that it is very straightforward to farm references from online sources, in particular Google Scholar; and the ease with which it is possible to export citations in all the various formats called for the academic journals. By contrast, its internal information management handling is poor. Thus it is possible to give keywords to individual references, but there is no hierarchy in the keywords -- you have a large, increasingly unmanageable, list of references. Although it is possible to access the underlying data using SQL, that approach is discouraged in favour of using an API. At some point -- though not in the immediate future -- I will try to integrate that underlying SQL Lite database into InfoQube.
The one thing I still need to make InfoQube work well with the mapping software is a facility to drop a named OLE link or a hyperlink to a specific item in InfoQube into Mot+, which is already OLE-aware. Then my information management architecture would look something like this:
The software I use to manage bibliographies and academic references is called Zotero [...] Although it is possible to access the underlying data using SQL, that approach is discouraged in favour of using an API. At some point -- though not in the immediate future -- I will try to integrate that underlying SQL Lite database into InfoQube.
The one thing I still need to make InfoQube work well with the mapping software is a facility to drop a named OLE link or a hyperlink to a specific item in InfoQube into Mot+, which is already OLE-aware. [...] I have tried to find a way to make a hyperlink (or an OLE link) to a specific item stored in InfoQube, so that that could be dropped into Mot+. However, if there is such a mechanism, I have not found it in the documentation. There is a mantis item 0937 which is I think linked.
My architecture diagram is at the moment wrong. The database engine in InfoQube at the present time is the one included in Microsoft Access, not SQL Server.