Ever wanted to represent your ideas, tasks, plans or dreams on a chart in few minutes? Well, the latest mind mapping softwares do that and much more. What more, some of the best mind mapping software’s are absolutely free.
Mind map is defined as a diagram created to visualize an idea or plan to aid in studying or understanding a topic, organization, theory, goals, plans or decision better. Mind map is basically an image-centered diagram representing semantic connections between information in a radial or non-linear graphical format.
Since these elements or information set is represented in groups, branches or areas it helps in faster and easier understanding which paves the way for brainstorming.
Semantic Networks Vs Mind Maps
Early forms of mind maps were semantic networks which were fundamentally directional or unidirectional graphs. The network consisted of concepts represented as vertices and relationships as edges.
In 1956, Richard.H. Richens from the Cambridge Language Research Unit first invented “Semantic Nets”. The Nets were invented for computers as an “interlingua” [International Auxillary Language, IAL, auxlang) for machines to translate natural languages. These Semantic Nets were further developend by M.Ross Quillian and Dr.Allan Collins as Mind Maps to study the process of human learning. Dr.Allan Collins greatly influenced the birth of the modern Mind Maps.
These early developments and involvement of mind maps for application development has helped Mind Maps evolve into software’s helping educational and business organizations adapt mind mapping.
A whole lot of Mind Mapping softwares are available on the Internet. Read our Mind Mapping Software review to select and download some of the best free mind mapping softwares available online.