The invention employs a graphical user interface to facilitate user interaction
with highly flexible, associative "matrices" that enable users to conveniently
organize digitally-stored "thoughts" (inter-related information) and their network
of inter-relationships. Each of the thoughts may be affiliated with one or more
application programs, such as a word processing or spreadsheet utility, or an Internet
browser. Users are able to conveniently select a current thought along with any
applications or content associated with that thought by interacting with the graphical
representation. That representation is automatically reoriented about the selected
thought, and is revised to reflect only those thoughts having predetermined relations
to that current thought. Users can easily modify the matrix by interactively redefining
relations between thoughts. In addition, the system provides functionality that
lets the user filter the matrix based on certain filter criteria. The system then
regenerates the matrix and displays the filtered version of that original matrix.
