A while back I submitted a short research outline to the AAAI Fall Symposium. It went over well enough that I have been expanding what I wrote there to continue towards my dissertation. Unfortunately, it did not scale directly; or rather, I need to restructure quite a bit to get it to scale up. So I have fallen to try to mind-map how all the bits and pieces inter-relate. I think that it has worked out rather well.

The mind-map doesn't really translate directly to an outline though. So I fell back on Tinderbox agents to help with this task. First I added a couple of simple attributes: Section and Order. Then we can use an agent to collect all the notes for a section, sorting on the Order attribute:

Since the agent is looking for notes with the section attribute that includes a given tag, we can place a note in multiple sections. The upshot is that I can now shuffle sections around just by changing two attributes and the agents automatically restructure the outline.

The downside is that I can only do this for a single level -- children of agents, but not grandchildren.