project-tracking tools for navigating with topic maps?

Question

I'm having trouble with project management & am looking for a good tool that will be a good match for the way my brain works (very associatively). I'd like a bug-tracker but one that I can group tasks into topics and associate the topics to each other in a graph (see the Wikipedia entry on Topic Maps ) so that I can find & visualize easily the "big picture". I've tried using AbstractSpoon's ToDoList and it works well but it's hierarchical and after about 30 or 40 entries I get lost in a maze of things to do.

any suggestions?

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edit: I've now tried Freemind, Conzilla, XMind, and VUE. Freemind and Conzilla were a little flaky. XMind seems to be the most polished of the four; they have a "pro" version which is non-free (pay by the month >:( which is weird) but an open-source base version which is free. You can't export the data directly from the program with the free version, but the storage format is just a .jar-style (ZIP file w/ extension .xmind) file that contains a "contents.xml" that is easily parsed if I needed to.

@codeslave:

but how important is the visual representation any way

Visualization is everything! I've got information overload and I need to be able to navigate a mess of information. I don't want it to be super-Powerpoint-polished, but I need to be able to use the associations that I create to remind myself how to find what I'm looking for. In an ideal world you could just full-text search everything, but that only works if you can remember the search phrase. Often I'll file something under "algorithm" and when I go to look for it I look under "programming" instead, or vice-versa. Associativity solves that problem by allowing me to visually browse my "mental model" of the information I've stored.

Answer 1

I've developed a small utility that will import MindMaps into Project plans. Let me know if something like this is helpful and I will develop it further.

Right now I just use it one-way from MindMap -> Project file. I generally use this for brainstorming and scope management, then export to Project when we like the scope of what we are working with for more formal project management.

Answer 2

What about using good old FogBugz? You can associate cases together pretty easily. You don't get the pretty graph of the topic space/mind map (feature idea Joel) but how important is the visual representation any way.

Answer 3

You can always get an CVS export from your "favourite" tool and create Topic Maps maps you can view with the Omnigator or the xSiteable tool. I used to have a few XSLT files to do such a job dealing with JIRA data. If the interest is high enough, maybe a ressurection is needed?