Is there any good software for doing personal notetaking for research projects, in a way that translates directly with minimal busywork/overhead into a formal ontology that software can manipulate?
I currently do my notetaking with personal wiki software and text files, but the bottleneck with this is actually going back and reading all this text. There's useful stuff there every time I go back to it, but the time it takes to go back through it is just too much overhead for it to be productive.
I'm thinking of writing my own simple software by gluing together some NLP libraries and such to try to automatically extract and summarize the content I'm looking for from my notes, but I wonder if there are good off the shelf solutions in this area. Everything I find in this area is really hardcore enterprise ontology type stuff that seem like they would only make the process less efficient instead of more efficient when used by just one person for their own notes.
My main desired feature is maximal simplicity and minimal busywork/overhead when entering and retrieving notes. Open source would be best, but I would use proprietary software if it's simple enough that I can just learn what it does and reimplement it myself later on.