Do you also have lots of notes and struggle to make sense of them? Bc. Petr Kudrnovský, a student of the Faculty of Information Technology at CTU in Prague (FIT CTU), designed and implemented a web application called ThinkLink as part of his bachelor’s thesis. The application helps users manage their digital notes more effectively by automatically finding notes that are thematically and contextually related. This significantly simplifies orientation and work with a personal knowledge base. For his work, he received the Dean’s Award.
People have been recording information since time immemorial—from cave paintings, through parchment manuscripts, to modern digital note-taking applications. While notes were once mainly used to quickly capture thoughts, today they are increasingly used to build complex knowledge systems.
In this context, it is not just about simple notes on a phone (“buy milk and eggs”), but rather about systems for creating and connecting knowledge—something used by students, researchers, authors, or anyone who takes notes for projects, studies, or ideas. Modern note-taking systems already allow manual linking of notes, but this requires users to know their notes well, organize them carefully, or remember their content. As the number of notes grows, this task becomes time-consuming and confusing. ThinkLink addresses this problem through automatic retrieval of relevant notes. When a user opens a note, the application immediately displays other notes that are thematically or contextually related—saving time, reducing duplication, and supporting efficient work with information.
“To explain it more concretely: the user imports their notes into ThinkLink from the application they use for note-taking. ThinkLink can read the content of these notes, analyze them, and find which ones are related. It then recommends related notes, links them together, and presents them as a network of connected information. ThinkLink is like an assistant that, thanks to content analysis, proposes connections on its own instead of the user having to create them manually,” explains Petr Kudrnovský.
The application was also tested by users in practice. They positively evaluated not only the accuracy of the recommended notes, but also the overall usability of the system and the relevance of different methods for finding related notes. The usability evaluation using the System Usability Scale questionnaire achieved a score of 81 points, indicating an intuitive and user-friendly experience.
ThinkLink is ready for further development and expansion. In the future, the application could offer features such as multilingual support, the ability to publish notes on the web, or custom visual styling of notes.
“The goal of the project was to make finding related notes as easy as possible for users. Thanks to automatic recommendations, users can spend less time organizing and more time thinking,” says Petr Kudrnovský.
