A notes app that can store connections between notes?

Question

I'm taking part in a tech quiz event happening in a while and a very frequent type of question is where several different items are showed and we're asked to name something that connects all of them, which is usually a company or some type of software/product. I thought an efficient way to take notes for it would be to store data as two-way connections between items, so if I opened something called "Microsoft", for example, It would show me a small description and things I've added which have a connection to Microsoft such as Skype\LinkedIn\GitHub, etc.

Surprisingly, I have not been able to find an app/service that can let me do this. Some apps like Evernote let you copy the internal link for a note and paste it in other notes, but that's not really a two-way link and I'm looking for something which places an emphasis on the connections between notes/items. I tried going ahead and spinning up something myself with ExpressJS and Vue, and although I ended up with something that "works", it wouldn't really be pleasant to use. Is there anything online that provides the functionality I'm looking for? Or is my best bet to stick with something like Evernote?

Answer 1

This isn't an exact match to your requirement for two-way links, but Zim Wiki will link pages based on keywords and also display all the backlinks to a given page. This is suited to more of a freeform network of text nodes than to a set of pairs of nodes that reference each other. In addition, it supports tags, so that you can apply a tag to multiple pages and then easily see all pages with that tag. Further, it also allows notes to be structured in a hierarchical outline, giving you another method to organize your notes.

Answer 2

This is a perfect application for Tinderbox. See https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ If you're stuck on Windows, there's a far more limited application called The Brain, but it may still do what you're asking.

Tinderbox lets you create a "mind map" that allows arrows to be tagged with types of relationships, and a whole lot more.