for Brainstorm.
Note this is not urgent but could be an objective to aim for in the future.
A system for automatically discovering, analysing, manipulation, and presentation of inter-relationships of concepts would be helpful in ordering much of the information generated by Brainstorming sessions.
Keywords that are in common "imply" a connection of some sort between separate documents.
But where "links or connections" are "stated or defined", there is no doubt about the connections.
These connections can be used to group data/issues/considerations/topics/factors into prominent groups, And show the overall independence or overlap between them.
The discussions comments may even be helpful to automatically detect what depends on what, and what might prevent what from happening.
Altavista search engine used to have a great system back in the late 90s, but no more. Kartoo has a good system - "try a search for "ubuntu brainstorm duplicate".
http://www.kartoo.com
Cuil search engine has a categorizer function;
http://www.cuil.com/
See how it arranges topics with contours of probabilities of topic overlap.
See the issues that are common between topics, and hover over them to see which topics they are forming the link between.
Click on a linking issue to zoom in on the topics related to it. Altavista used to have an ability to select a "group" of issues and/or topics to very efficiently zoom in on exactly what you were looking for.
There are other prioritising search engines, such as;
http://www.vroosh.com has "group results" feature.
http://clusty.com/ has "clustering" feature
(anybody know where google does this? - summer of code?)
These system show inter-relations between topics, via their common issues/factors.
An additional step in relatedness, is the importance of the subtopics and issues.
The importance is much more subjective and depends on the person, and varies from person to person. So when a map of topics and inter-related issues is displayed, the user can customise the degree of emphasis (eg. color/apparent 3d height/shading boundary marker) for showing the more important areas.
The "importance" would help indicate where work needs to be done, or where opportunities are.
There are some great 3D visualizers, and data visualizers in open source, which could be used for this project.
