Discovery & Insight

Now & Then uses data and knowledge "mining" techniques to discover associations, relationships, and calendar properties for all information recorded in your journal.
It automatically "learns" and "models" your journal information by parsing queries and by numerically scaling the relationships in both user vocabulary and journal knowledge. It monitors journal usage and combines initializations, updates, and feedback to automatically refine its understanding of your world. The rules you construct, your saved queries, synonym lists, notification and alerting thresholds, calendar use, tracking & monitoring tables, and topic assignments all become a part of Now & Then's intelligence. 

Its ability to understand content, context and concepts increases as you use your journal. Its growing knowledge and "knowledge about knowledge" enables it to retrieve clear and focused views of your thoughts and your life―packaged and presented in informative, meaningful, and entertaining formats.

Rewarding journal discovery fuels your commitment to use Now & Then. Your browsing, sooner or later, will uncover an important aspect of your life. Once that happens, you gain a new appreciation for how your daily updates provide the raw material for eventual insight and discovery.

Your journal updates are collected, captured and entered using a variety of methods. Entries can be narrative, structured, graphic, or a combination. Entries can be linked with multimedia, tables, graphics, calendar timelines, web addresses, or other journal entries. All journal content can be annotated, or added to, without changing the original. Annotations may, however, change the interpretation or provide perspective to your original journal entries. Narrative memoirs are supported by a full featured word processor with spell check and thesaurus.

Utilities for Discovery & Insight

Predictive Browsing
Now & Then's Predictive Browser makes good guesses in interpreting the context and direction of your browsing. The Predictive Browser, which you can turn on or off ant any time, uses your queries to organize and map associations among seemingly unrelated journal entries.

The Predictive Browser is knowledge-based―it uses its knowledge of your journal information andthe results of each browsing iteration to re-focus and guide and your browsing.  It is useful in recognizing associations and relationships among journal entries and can suggest alternative browse paths to explore―with possible serendipitous results.

Browse Trees & Templates
You may choose to use Now & Then's Knowledge Tree or Browsing Templates to focus and refine an iterative search. Each search iteration may suggest changes in the Topic, date range, Categories, text phrase, or tree branches that will widen, narrow, or redirect your search. Browsing Templates may be modified and saved for future use.

Your browsing results at every stage are visually represented for your analysis and examination using charts, lists, calendars, timelines, graphs and tables.

Browse, Tag & Collect
Of course, during a browsing session you can assign information to Categories, Topics, and Collections. Or, for later reference, copying, grouping, or assignment, you can use Marks, Bookmarks, and Tags.      

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