This paper presents a creativity support tool, called FreePub, to collect and organize scienti?c material using mindmaps. Mindmaps are visual, graph-based represenations of concepts, ideas, notes, tasks, etc. They generally take a hierarchical or tree branch format, with ideas branching into their subsections. FreePub supports creativity cycles. A user starts such a cycle by setting up her domain of interest using mindmaps. Then, she can browse mindmaps and launch search tasks to gather relevant publications from several data sources. FreePub, besides publications, identi?es helpful supporting material (e.g., blog posts, presentations). All retrieved information from FreePub can be imported and organized in mindmaps. FreePub has been fully implemented on top of FreeMind, a popular open-source, mindmapping tool.
Mind maps are used by millions of people. In this paper we present how information retrieval on mind maps could be used to enhance expert search, document summarization, keyword based search engines, document recommender systems and determining word relatedness. For instance, words in a mind map could be used for creating a skill profile of the mind maps' author and hence enhance expert search. This paper is a research-in-progress paper which means no research results are presented but only ideas.