Note: This is a general idea, I'm not suggesting the features should work exactly like how I laid out, but more what end result / function should be strived for (ie. chronologically organizing information in a more selective way)

To provide context:
I'm interested in mapping connections / relationships between individuals. It's very important to be able to do this, as understanding relationships between individuals is critical for analysing potential conflicts of interest, including historically.

The individuals are the bedrock "child thoughts" of my brain.

Their parent thoughts will be things which bundle people together such as organisations, movements, maybe locations, publications (books ect.).

So sibling thoughts of a given child thought will be based on the bundling-factors that individual partakes in (for instance, what organisations they are part of).

Jump thoughts will be other individuals they have a 1 to 1 connection with such as being friends (assuming we've not mapped their friendship group as a parent thought).

This model is great but it has two big problems.

Two individual may be part of an organisation but at completely different times, so their shared membership may not be a good indicator that they have a relationship.

Also, an individual's precise relationship to an organisation may change across time.

I've described 3 problems (A,B,C) and their respective solutions below.

The problem:
A. Currently the timeline feature only allows us to state an event / time period and map that to one individual. This already creates a problem for the above model.

If I want to track who is the chairman of an organisation at any given time. I could add an event / time period under each relevant individual to show their tenure as chairman.

But ideally I'd also want that to be under the content / notes of the organisation (when I click on that idea), so already that would require two seperate events to be created to describe one event in reality.

B. The second big problem is if I simply wanted to see the temporal relationship between two individuals, by seeing what they're getting up to or which organisations they're members of at different times, it currently isn't easy at all to do.

Likewise, if I wanted to see an organisation's timeline and compare it to one or more individual's behaviour overtime, this is also not easy to do.

Why is this? Well because it's currently not possible to toggle or control which events show up on the timeline. All have to show up at once, making it so it can get crowed extremely quickly and easily.

C. The third big problem relates to the brain mapping itself, which may be preferable to the timeline as a means to represent connections which just exist during a given period of time.

Currently the connections between ideas aren't at all impacted by time. So using the model I set out above, I can just show who was part of an organisation at any point in time, but not who was part of an organisation for a given time period.

I could get around this by making an organisation into a parent idea and then make it so each year of that organisation's existence is a child idea.

However this would of course significantly complicate the brain model, and any given unit of time I try to use would be arbitrary.

If the chairman changed multiple times within a year lets say, then I'd have to label multiple child connections as 'chairman'.

Information about who was specifically the chairman when will be lost if I try to gleam it from the brain model (instead of the notes).

The solution:
A.The first quick fix is simply to allow groups of thoughts to be added to one event.

That way, when someone becomes chairman of a company, for instance, I could put both the thought of that company and the individual under the same event so it doesn't clog up the timeline as much.

Also, ideally the instead of the timeline showing [thought - label], the label is what should be shown, then maybe a list of the associated thoughts. That way we have more control over what we want to see in the condensed display on the timeline.

B. This problem would also be relatively easy to fix. All that would be needed is a feature where you can search up and tick which thoughts are visible, which would make it so only events those thoughts have been tied to show up.

You could further enhance this by optionally allowing the user in this toggle menu to select which events (tied to the selected idea) specifically show up or not.

That way, the user would have excellent control over which events are actually visible or not, allowing them to have an easy chronological comparision of different individuals / thoughts behaviour across time.

The user would be able to control the complexity and how many events and / or the thoughts associated with them are being shown at once.

This could be further optimized with an optional view showing other thoughts (in addition to those the user themselves selected) which are associated with the events that are visible (contigent upon the thoughts selected by the user)

That way, this additional view would allow you to see all thoughts / individuals also associated with the events your selected thoughts / individuals are involved in.

Whilst the normal view would allow you to compare what only your selected individuals are doing at given times without this added complexity.

C. To overcome this limitation, i'd recommend making two changes.

First of all, make it so thoughts themselves have an ingrained time / period feature.
This will make it so if I have a thought for an individual or organisation, I could encode the chronological dates regarding when it was born / created and then died / stopped existing.

Second of all, I'd recommend adding the exact same feature to links themselves.

However, given that an individuals connection to others or organisations change overtime, I'd recommend enabling there to be more than one time-period in a link with a different label attatched to it.

It could be toggled so that it's up to the user whether these dates / the period show up when hovering over an idea or a link with the cursor.

But more importantly, a feature should be added to enable the user to set what time period they want the brain to display.

For instance, in a brain storing organisations and individuals as ideas, I could set the period I want to see between 2015-2020.
Any organisations or individuals which only existed before or after this period wouldn't show up.

The same would be true for links. If a person was only part of an organisation between 2012-2014, their connection to the organisation would no longer be visible

All the whilst, that individual could still show up if they existed in 2015-2020, and their connections to other ideas would be shown.

How specific the time period is can be completely controlled by the user. Therefore, they'll be able to both have rich information about connections during a specific time or have rich information about connections more generally if chronology isn't so important to them. All gleamed from a visual display.

Adding this feature would make the software have an entire new dimension and means of visually organising information. It would be very very powerful.

As an example:
Let's say a company had 3 seperate chairmen within a year. I may only care about who was involved in the company under one of those chairmen.

I could:
Hover over the link between that individual and company to see when they were a chairman.

Then I'd set the global temporal period to match that so I only see individuals and connections which existed for that time-period.

If I wanted to do the same for the other chairmen, or just look at connections as a whole, I could then do that on the exact same model, simply by changing the global time period toggle!

P. S.
To make gauging what time-period to change to easier, I'm sure features could be added.

For instance, a search function for could exist for links (which first puts "default" into the first thought which is just whatever the active thought is) and then you type in the second thought, and this gives you a list of each link and the time period involved which exists between them.

And maybe a scroller could be added so you can quickly zoom through different time periods and see how the links change for whatever the active thought is.