* software for brainstorming?

[jmurphy]

Does software exist to do the task described below?

Assume I have a set of facts written on index cards. For instance, a genealogical record might list a name, an street address, a place, an employer, an occupation.

If I had these on physical cards, I could shuffle them about stick them up on a bulletin board, etc. and see which cards matched which other cards.

I'd like something that would look at a set of records and tell me:

name [name] appears in 8 of 10 records
address [address] appears in 5 of 10 records

Or if I start with record A, it would tell me record D has the closest match to record A with 5 out of 7 elements matching.

Or if that isn't feasible, anything that would let me do a Global Search of all records for a string that I could define, that would spit out a list of all the records matching that string.

Barring that, if anyone could explain how Family Historian generates the matching score for its compare/merge, that would be of interest.

What I'm looking for is a better way to examine historical records to see whether they might belong to the same person before I merge them in Family Historian.

Computers are wonderful for some tasks, but for others, I work better by laying out all the information I have and looking at it all at once. I'm missing the insight I used to get by having index cards spread out all over the floor and looking at a data set as a whole.

Jan


ID:3798

[RalfofAmber]

You could stifck it all in a database and write some queeries (I am toying with doing this to help wade through the records I capture from Parish Registers). Your requirement is more complex and probably would benefit from a visualisation tool. I am looking at something to allow geo-mapping of records and classification by type along the lines of Family Atlas.

For the more generalised requirement you ideally want some data mining tools (not cheap!). There are open source such as Rattle http://rattle.togaware.com/ but it all looks non-trivial to me!

[Jane]

I had a bit of a look around and Treeline looks pretty good. http://treeline.bellz.org/

You can define your own 'tables' and do full searches or field based searches.

[tanti7762]

You might be able to use Microsoft OneNote.
Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote

[RalfofAmber]

I use One Note, it is great for scrap booking and string random pieces of data but you have to produce your own taxonmy (i.e. name all the tabs / pages).

It is good for find all mentions of a piece of text bur doesn't do correlation/ complex queeries and so on.

It is a great research filing tool though, and I keep my OneNote folder in my family historian file structure

[RalfofAmber]

I just looked at Treeline that Jane mentions, again I think this is great if you know how your data is structured, but doesn't tell you what your structure should be

[jmurphy]

I used to have a free-form database on my XT. I really miss some of the old tools that were available under DOS. [frown]

I also considered making transcriptions of the documents and using something like grep.

Thanks for all the replies. I'll check these out.

Jan

[JonAxtell]

There is also Custodian3 - http://www.custodian3.co.uk/

[bgriffiths]

Tony Jones said:
There are open source such as Rattle http://rattle.togaware.com/ but it all looks non-trivial to me!

You are not wrong there[lol]
Although having gone to the trouble of downloading and installing it (no mean feat in itself) I am now determined to work out what to do with it. Pass the aspirin somebody.....[confused]
Brian

[jmurphy]

JonAxtell said:
There is also Custodian3 - http://www.custodian3.co.uk/

Jon -- thanks for the reminder. (I had looked at Custodian3 before we had XP, and had said 'maybe later' when we had a more robust system.)

Jan