I'm glad for the article on mind mapping software. Ok. I'm even sold and will likely be looking into acquiring something for my personal use.

What I missed in the article was a comparison between mind mapping and ER or UML diagramming. Mind mapping obviously leaves off the technical precision necessary for an automated implementation. Then from the example, at the lower levels of a hierarchy there is a switch from entity abstractions to what would be actual row instances (eg. Data Warehouse Appliance-->Training-->instances of who and what require training). Add methods and we are nearing UML territory. Is it the lack of formality in the approach which is its strength?

The approach seems very familiar to data modeling. Lack of comparisons to other more formal approaches of documenting thoughts (for instance network modeling and/or programmatic functional decomposition) left me wondering where a tool like this might fit (all the more reason to go acquire one, I suppose).

Still, I was quite happy to see organization of thoughts strongly supported in the area of database management. Value in data modeling comes from simply approaching a problem with some way of organizing data and function rather than using a DBMS as a file server then managing all business rules and data relations in unstructured harried application code.