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posted by martyb on Saturday April 23 2016, @10:12AM   Printer-friendly

Emacs org-mode is very powerful tool for personal knowledge management, but can be hard to learn, makes it hard to have the same content (notes) referenced in more than one place, and can be awkward for the hands. Finding other tools inadequate for various reasons, I wrote OneModel to meet my own needs, and made it available. If you touch-type, it is extremely fast for to-do lists and notes of all kinds, and I generate the project web site from part of its data. It is much easier to learn and faster to navigate than emacs, and you can have the same content in as many places as desired, without duplication.

But it wants to be more: It uses an internal structure that has big future ideas for knowledge management, like embedding code within groups of entities, or linking across OneModel instances, so you can choose to share data from your personal organizer, or subscribe to (or copy) data from other instances: like a wikipedia but where the internal knowledge is structured so can be used for computation, rich queries etc. Imagine asking a system: what villages in history had economic improvements in a 4-year period, all external conditions being equal, and what do those cases all have in common?--that is the long-term vision of the system. The vision and internal structure are intended as be a prototype of a platform to manage all mankind's knowledge as a usefully computable whole.

The web site has a few screen shots (remember it's an ugly prototype but works well! -- I have my calendar/life notes/todos/contacts etc in it now) and a demo system to play with without installing anything.

(It is written in scala, using a simple/approachable coding style that should be readable by most programmers with just minutes of scala knowledge--I hope--and uses postgresql for the data.)

I frankly don't mind if someone else takes the ideas and does a better job with them: we can do better than managing mankind's knowledge in the form of huge sophisticated piles of words: words are not the real knowledge but a superstrate over it, and they are hard to compute well. Feedback welcome.


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  • (Score: 1) by lcall on Saturday April 23 2016, @01:37PM

    by lcall (4611) on Saturday April 23 2016, @01:37PM (#336207)

    The idea is, if you read the screen and try what it says, it just works. Like:

    In my OM instance, I can find my notes on a given topic, like gift ideas, for example, by simply typing "5gd" which jumps me to there. Or other combinations to find it on a different contextual path.

    You can move an entry up 5 by typing 22, or down 20 by 26, or up a level with 28, or down a level with 7x (to select the target entry), then 27.

    You can create relationships to other existing objects by typing 42, typing in a search string, and hitting x (or whatever letter from the search results).

    It's all on the screen.

    Maybe a demo video would be a better way to try to convey it.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by linuxrocks123 on Sunday April 24 2016, @05:17AM

    by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Sunday April 24 2016, @05:17AM (#336446) Journal

    I did something similar to what you did a while back, but kind of different, too. I wrote MailTask [github.com], which is an email manager, but contains within it a todo list as well, and the todo list is automatically populated with new or updated tasks when emails come in. I need to write docs for it, but it's definitely awesome, for me personally at least. Techies could probably get it working without docs if they really wanted to, hence the link

    I'd love other people to use it ... and since your submission got accepted, after I write docs, I'll wait for the queue to be near-empty someday and a story on MailTask as well :) But, even if other people never do, it was still worth it for me to write it -- because I use it and like it.

    I looked at OneModel and it doesn't look like it's for me; mind maps etc. were never something I found a lot of use for. But thanks for sharing.

    And regarding some of the jerks who posted (I saw at least one), don't listen to them; there are always jerks. And, I hope you get some more users, but, even if no one else ever uses it, you wrote something useful to you. And that makes it worth it. Congratulations.

    • (Score: 1) by lcall on Monday April 25 2016, @06:00PM

      by lcall (4611) on Monday April 25 2016, @06:00PM (#337021)

      Thanks. Best wishes! Feel free to stay in touch at onemodel.org if the mood ever strikes you. :)