More on MindModel Posted 11:25 PM by Nathaniel

The quiet of a Christmas weekend has given me some time to fiddle a bit more with MindModel. It has some strikingly powerful qualities, and I still feel as if I have not by any means plumbed its depths.

Basically, it’s a place for storing any kind of information – although it is oriented more toward field-based than free-form. The company/author (he communicates very personally in the “help” files and on the site, so it’s easy to think you’re hearing from a person, rather than an organization) gently points out the weaknesses of trying organize information in a free-form way, but doesn’t rant about it.

Similarly, if you need a fancy GUI, this is not for you. All the displays are absolutely functional, to a fault – Shaker-style UI, if you will.

But underneath it all is a Microsoft business-quality true relational dbms. The MindModel paradigm has laid an orderly and consistent grammar on top of it all, so that once you understand the concepts of noun, verb, statement, subject, object, and collection, there is not much you cannot do.

Another observation: The author’s parsimonious attitude extends to a variety of functions. For example, he readily uses Excel, Word,  and text files as buffers, and as a place to do such things as “search and replace” or mail merge.

MindModel maintains a careful balance between discipline and freedom. For example, you must use noun and statement types from its lists, without creating your own; but the lists are lengthy, and even laced with the author’s gentle humor. (Download the 30–day free trial to see what I mean.)

You enter new information in a variety of ways. There are very flexible import facilities, for lists of things. When you want to tie such things together, you enter statements. A statement is something like, “Donald Hutchinson [noun], subject] is the person to speak to at [verb, in MM terms] at HelpDesk Incorporated [noun, object] relevant to [preposition] software package [noun type]: HelpDesk Manager [noun, object of preposition].” You don’t enter the stuff in brackets; you pick the items from lists. So entering such a statement is really very fast and easy.

Of course, statements can be simpler: “Susan White knows how to use software package HelpDesk Manager.”

You can query the model with great precision, or very generally. So it’s very easy to find out everything the model knows about Susan White, about HelpDesk Manager, about zip code 23320, or anything else; any statement that includes any of those nouns will be found almost instantly.

Likewise, you could “ask” (I use the term in quotes because there is a form-based query), “Who is an expert, in anything?” MindModel will deliver all the statements that have “is an expert in” in them. You could expand that to include everyone who “knows how to use” something, and get a very fast picture of who knows what, how well.

The product is being used all over the world for CRM, help-desks, human resources—almost anything you can think of.

So far, the part I miss is GUI-based forms for both input and output.. There is an XML dialect (MMXML) available for creating some kinds of reports; but apparently no way to create forms for structured input.

A Web-server version makes it astonishingly easy to create a database-driven Web site; see  http://www.mindmodeldinosaurs.com as an impressive example.

If you need to organize bunches of information, and are not a programmer, but are serious about being able to get at it all, in very flexible ways, without being locked-in to a structure from the outset, you should check this out.

And I welcome additional comments about this; I’m sure I’m overlooking a lot. But I’m very intrigued.