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NoteCards is an extensible environment designed to help people formulate, structure, compare, and manage ideas. NoteCards provides the user with a “semantic network” of electronic notecards interconnected by typed links. The system provides tools to organize, manage, and display the structure of the network, as well as a set of methods and protocols for creating programs to manipulate the information in the network. NoteCards is currently being used by more than 50 people engaged in idea processing tasks ranging from writing research papers through designing parts for photocopiers.

In this paper we briefly describe NoteCards and the conceptualization of idea processing tasks that underlies its design. We then describe the NoteCards user community and several prototypical NoteCards applications. Finally, we discuss what we have learned about the system's strengths and weaknesses from our …