Extracting Key Points From Bulky Documents
From the Project Management 2.0 Blog
by Dave Garrett
New technologies, concepts, and Web 2.0 tools are popping up everywhere. How can you use them to help your project team collaborate, communicate - or just give your project an extra boost? [Contact Dave]
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Date
Situation: You Have To Plow Through Dense Documentation Every Day of Your Life.
MindSystems Theme Reader scans through your favorite Word document and presents you with a visual "Cliff's Notes" version in the form of a MindMap. This isnt just creating an outline from the table of contents - like you have in the standard MindManager setup. This tool uses Artificial Intelligence to really draw out themes, ideas, and keywords and drop them into a hierarchy.
Here's how they say it works...
What makes this different to search engine technology? This technology uses a type of intelligent scanning that is able to accurately detect natural patterns in information and apply a interpretation in a way a human researcher would. Standard search engine technology provides a powerful indexing system, but even the largest search engines can't control the relevance of the information returned by a search. This is controlled by the content and how or where keywords appear in a document.
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I gave it a try using the free 21 day trial, running it against a fairly obscure 16 page doc I found on the web (
The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution). This is one of those documents that I think I might like to read, but as I get into it ----- well, not so much.
Themereader actually helped a great deal more than I thought it would, extracting a lot of information into a mindmap that really gave me a view of what the paper said without reading it. I'm sure its not flawless, but I think its helpful (
click on the JPEG to see a larger picture of the MMP).
Posted on: July 22, 2007 09:29 PM |
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Comments (2)
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Randy Bennett
sr proj mgr| fiserv
Collegeville, Pa, United States
FYI...The link for Theme Reader was broken. However I found it at: http://www.mindsystems.com.au/products/themereader/
Great - thank you, Randy! I bought this tool, and have recently been using it to summarize techincal in large batches in preparation for an upgrade of a product suite with lots of add-on modules. When you do them en masse, it creates a batch file mindmap ''dashboard'' with links to all of them. Makes for a quick skim through the important points, and then I can delete what I don''t think is important and use what is left in the map to provide to the folks that will be putting together the implementation plans...
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