Technoetic

I’m always looking for efficient ways to manage my personal information and activities. I invested a little time during this last weekend to try the MindRaider semantic outlining tool. This isn’t a complete review. It’s only an short experience report based on my initial impressions.

MindRaider is a Semantic Web outliner. I’m interested in Semantic Web technology and I was interested in seeing if it would be more useful for my purposes that the wiki-based tool I’ve been using.

First the good news. MindRaider installs easily on Windows and it’s not difficult to begin doing some basic outlining with the tool. It also contains an interesting visual representation of the semantic “concepts” and conceptual relationships.

The bad news is that the documentation is very minimal. I created a few concepts and wanted to attach a web hyperlink to both of them. It seemed that I had to create two instances of the web link with each copy related to it’s own concept (a strict hierarchical tree structure). I’ve read in the forums that there is an experimental way to create knowledge networks rather than trees but apparently this feature is currently not well supported.

A wiki tool can represent some complex knowledge structures although that knowledge is not represented in a structured form like RDF. MindRaider includes a TWiki compatible wiki editor and that’s nice, but if I’m going to use the tool primarily as a desktop wiki, there are more streamlined tools available for that purpose. I’ve found WikiPad is proving to be very useful and easy to use.

This is not a criticism of MindRaider. It’s a very interesting experiment even if it a great match for my current needs. I’ll definitely be watching the MindRaider project to see how it progresses.