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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

I was once involved in Topic Maps, a failed ISO standard that was challenged Semantic Web at some point.

One thing I remember is the tacit knowledge that all kinds of mind maps are useful on the spot to the person who writes them. Communicating anything via mind maps is difficult, and they become unintelligible even to authors very quickly.

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I was rooting for Topic Maps at the time. The notion of Topics, Associations between them and Occurrences of information about a topic seemed to me to be very powerful. I don't think they were necessarily meant to model mind maps (altho no doubt you could), more of a super charged index of an information space.

FWIW Topic Maps were the inspiration for BrainTool [1], which is a 'Topic Manager' maybe in the same space as Dendron. I wrote about the model here [2]. I'm hoping people will exchange Topic Maps that index an information space or area of research!

[1] https://braintool.org

[2]https://braintool.org/2021/05/15/Organizing-your-life-with-a...

Totally agree that mind maps are hard to scale out, either across time or people. This is why Dendron focuses on helping folks create consistent structures (we call them schemas) to help map out their knowledge base. Think of it as a type system for organizing your notes. More details on that here (https://nesslabs.com/dendron-featured-tool) if curious

I propose a Dendron Browser Plugin with same annotation functionality (FTW) =D

It would help with IP (Input + Process) components for those who adhere to the "Modern" Zettlekasten's IPA framework [1] (Input + Process + Action) conceptualized and presented by Marc Koenig.

1- [https://youtu.be/rjU65enKSEE].

Reminds me of the Apple spin-out name Kalida (sp?) that tried to promote a "personalized programming language" called ScriptX allowing each developer to define their own personal language syntax and write code in that. I was floored something so dumb would get a complete corporate spin-out, developers and the full rah-rah marketing push. Once developed and available, people quickly found nobody could share or even read one another's code. Duh.

You're thinking of Kaleida Labs, the corporation that was co-owned by Apple and IBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs.

Agree with this, at the same time I find the simple act of writing the notes or a mind map helps with retention even if they're unreadable later on.

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