Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information into a hierarchy, showing relationships among pieces of the whole. It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those major ideas.
Memex is a hypothetical electromechanical device for interacting with microform documents and described in Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory". The name memex is a portmanteau of memory and expansion.
Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them."
A personal information manager is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to personal information management as a field of study. As an information management tool, a PIM tool's purpose is to facilitate the recording, tracking, and management of certain types of "personal information".
Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote co-operation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connections and opportunities to learn. An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.
Coined in 1987, the term Knowledge Navigator described a future computing system and how people might use it to navigate worlds of knowledge. In a sense, the user is actually the “Knowledge Navigator,” though the term often refers to the system’s primary interface, a tablet computer. That part often stands for the whole system. The term is also the title of an Apple “vision video.” The concept was described by former Apple Computer CEO John Sculley and John A. Byrne in their book, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple.
“A future-generation Macintosh, which we should have early in the twenty-first century, might well be a wonderful fantasy machine called the Knowledge Navigator, a discoverer of worlds, a tool as galvanizing as the printing press. Individuals could use it to drive through libraries, museums, databases, or institutional archives. This tool wouldn't just take you to the doorstep of these great resources as sophisticated computers do now; it would invite you deep inside its secrets, interpreting and explaining—converting vast quantities of information into personalized and understandable knowledge.”
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e., unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both.
Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a process of collecting information that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities and the way in which these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM).
In computer science, interactive computing refers to software which accepts input from the user as it runs.
A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database through semantic queries.
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki. Data that has been encoded can be used in semantic searches, used for aggregation of pages, displayed in formats like maps, calendars and graphs, and exported to the outside world via formats like RDF and CSV.
A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users.
An argument map or argument diagram is a visual representation of the structure of an argument. An argument map typically includes all the key components of the argument, traditionally called the conclusion and the premises, also called contention and reasons. Argument maps can also show co-premises, objections, counterarguments, rebuttals, and lemmas. There are different styles of argument map but they are often functionally equivalent and represent an argument's individual claims and the relationships between them.
In computer science, the semantic desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data are more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a computer could be. It also encompasses some ideas about being able to share information automatically between different people. This concept is very much related to the Semantic Web, but is distinct insofar as its main concern is the personal use of information.
"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in The Atlantic in July 1945 and republished in an abridged version in September 1945—before and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Early conceptions of hypertext defined it as text that could be connected by a linking system to a range of other documents that were stored outside that text. In 1934 Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, developed a blueprint for links that telescoped out from hypertext electrically to allow readers to access documents, books, photographs, and so on, stored anywhere in the world.
Productivity software is application software used for producing information. Its names arose from it increasing productivity, especially of individual office workers, from typists to knowledge workers, although its scope is now wider than that. Office suites, which brought word processing, spreadsheet, and relational database programs to the desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity software. They revolutionized the office with the magnitude of the productivity increase they brought as compared with the pre-1980s office environments of typewriters, paper filing, and handwritten lists and ledgers. In the United States, some 78% of "middle-skill" occupations now require the use of productivity software. In the 2010s, productivity software has become even more consumerized than it already was, as computing becomes ever more integrated into daily personal life.
A Zettelkasten or card file consists of small items of information stored on Zettels, paper slips or cards, that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags. It has often been used as a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management for research, study, and writing.
Obsidian is a personal knowledge base and note-taking software application that operates on Markdown files. It allows users to make internal links for notes and then to visualize the connections as a graph. It is designed to help users organize and structure their thoughts and knowledge in a flexible, non-linear way. The software is free for personal use, with commercial licenses available for pay.
