I, like many of you I suspect, take copious notes when reading and working through math exercises/theorems/constructions. I have stacks and stacks of notes ranging from one day old to several years. It often turns out that something I'm working through is actually something that I have taken notes on previously but since there may have been several intervening years I don't actually recall taking the notes and, even if I did, my notes are in such a disheveled state that I would have little chance of actually finding anything specific. Many times, I have attempted to go through and organize them but end up with little piles everywhere and finally throw up my hands in frustration and toss them back in the box.
I am not looking for a technical solution to this problem as discussed here. What I seek is a mathematical information model of sorts that can overlay a structure on the knowledge that I acquire and annotate. If such a model exists, it would probably come in the form of a directed dependency graph with arbitrarily deep nesting. Any problem, theorem, example, counterexample, definition should be able to fit naturally in some node (although could possibly exist in more than one node). The problem here though is any such model is bound to be extremely complicated and a very practical problem is how to label the nodes in a concise but meaningful way.
I'm not looking for a way to organize "all of mathematics" but a natural way to organize the mathematics that I learn. Finally, within this context, I have the following questions:
Can anyone suggest an effective means by which this organization can be accomplished? Has anyone attempted to organize their notes/thoughts via the directed graph idea and, if so, what were the results?