The use of knowledge graphs is a great passion of mine. In them, I document ideas, concepts or experiences as "nodes" and attempt to find common threads that link them together. Attached is an example of a central node being cancer and some related concepts, like the tumour microbiome, an assay relevant in assessing MHC-I binding of neo-epitopes (single chain trimer assay) or a conceptual framework (Tragedy of the Commons to see how cancer is an issue of public goods and social co-operation that goes awry).
Here is an example using Obsidian, which is a free open-source tool to implement knowledge graphs using simple Markdown files. This graph does not have clear hierarchy or organisational principles (yet), hence why I am trying to think of a way to organise it in order to "harvest" fruitful scientific associations in a way that can provide value to me and others.
The main value that I see in this is connecting distant parts of knowledge. I also document books or poetry I read in this database, and can thereby discover links between ideas they dicuss and underlying scientific concepts. For example, the collection of short stories "Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges explores many ideas around time, infinity and alternative sampling that are similar to the combinatorial explosion problems in biology, such as predicting protein 3D structure from linear sequences of amino acids, where the mathematical space of all possible configurations is far from actually being explored in nature. Borges also has a beautiful short story called La Escritura del Dios evoking the "secrets" imprinted in the patterns of a jaguar's skin that reminds me of how Turing patterns are involved in biological pattern formation.