For those who use systems like this or bubble graphs or roam, where you seek to loosely "relate" items with other items:
Doesn't it just get messy and overwhelming after a while? I visualize it as nodes and edges, but where the edges don't really mean anything specific other than "this makes me think of that".
I feel like a system that supported a lot of different types of edges that each had clear meaning would be more useful. "this requires that" and "this supports that" and "this needs to happen after that" or "this blocks that", etc.
Agreed. How data relates to other data is as important as the data itself. It’s unfortunate the roam crowd doesn’t seem aware of semantic web. The technical work to model a knowledge graph has already been done, and the result is RDF. The semantic web community has created vast knowledge graphs and ontologies, encoded in an open standard, and also tools to explore these graphs.
How can one use the labelled edges in [[ ... ]]-formatted personal note collection to get any actual value from it? (personal note because that's what at least some people use roam, obsidian, etc. for)
It would enable someone to query their knowledge graph.
Imagine I have a personal collection of recipes I like to cook, and the recipes link to foods with relation ingredient. When my friend comes over for dinner, I could ask them what foods in my kitchen they like, and instantly query all recipes containing those foods. Maybe I’ve added how long each recipe takes to cook, which appears as one of the many RDF triples I can use to filter and sort the matching recipes.
Knowledge graphs enable incredibly rich, structured queries. This is the promise and power of semantic web. Otherwise all you can do is rudimentary keyword searching.
The vision of the semantic web is to enable these rich queries over the entire collection of human knowledge, not just personal notes.
The true problem to me here seems to be then that I don't know what type of queries I'll run in the future, so I can't attach proper labels (to edges or nodes, doesn't matter which).
I see this exact problem with bookmarking tools. I have a large collection of bookmarks with many kinds of tags (topical, meta-tags like !important, !soon, !followup, !share, ...), etc. But the reality is those tags are not sufficient to search for what I need - adding a piece of content and searching for it are far removed in time (weeks, months, sometimes years), and "future me" doesn't remember the context something he put in with. The today-me can't anticipate which of the pieces of content will be useful and to what end.
So I don't know _what to search for_ or _how to search for it_ == but just as importantly, I don't know _what use to label something for_ and _what terms/structure_ to add to it.
I think the semantic web must have assumed we'll tag/label things correctly, and the reality is we don't do it because it's on average too hard.
Semantic web doesn’t assume people would label everything the same. You can relate two resources (you call them tags) as “the same thing” :) It’s just another relationship.
RDF models facts/knowledge as subject-predicate-object statements called triples. Each part of the triple is called a resource and has a URL.
You wouldn’t bookmark pages, you would state facts about them in RDF using a vocabulary of resources.
A hypothetical semantic note taking app would let you insert many facts (RDF triples) about something you find relevant into your own knowledge graph, and the facts you insert would be constructed from your chosen vocabularies (https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ontology).
The intention here is to fully support [[rdf]] as the Agora grows; I am just getting up to speed with it, but I'm in contact with more knowledgeable people thankfully :)
My current hypothesis is that [[wikilinks]] on top of the block concept popularized by tools like [[roam]] (lists in Markdown) are enough to implement a small lightweight DSL that maps to [[rdf]]. See [[agora actions]] for an early stage example representative of the direction I want to go in.
People have been saying this for 20 years now. But try writing basic search queries.
Ubuntu/Gnome's builtin search engine (Tracker) for god knows what reason uses RDF/SPARQL and anyone who wants can run
"tracker sparql <query>" from the command line or their app/library/tool to query all kinds of things on their system.
Its been around for a long long time but count how many people/projects use it.
I have an idea similar to this (in many way Agoria has improved upon my idea, mostly in the fact it actually exists)
Something I spent time thinking about is adding metadata around relationships between nodes. In keeping with the KISS philosophy of markdown it's difficult to capture that without adding some messy syntax.
On the whole, I think OP is onto something. Though heavily geared towards those of the technical community.
Ahoy! If you would like to collaborate, the Agora is [[open source]] :)
I know what you mean w.r.t. Markdown syntax. One thing I'm trying to do with the Agora is to use a single extension ([[wikilinks]]) as much as I can; see for example [[agora actions]]. TLDR: I think wikilinks and blocks are enough to craft a simple DSL that lets you remove most of the limitations for defining/passing metadata.
At first i embraced the graph structure on my notes. Later on, it gets messy. Some of my nodes are "lost forever" since i cant recall the exact [[NodeName]] to link it back. Then i implemented a log system to automatically write down all the new node created, chronologically. So, i could always look for this log to rediscover all my lost nodes. Later, i found that retracing all the log to rediscover my nodes is such a laborious task.
So i give up, and currently i am embracing the tree structure to manage my networked notes. Now, i'm testing this new system. Maybe in the future i could find even better way to manage my notes.
It has the inverse trend of a files/folders system. Roam graphs start out messy but a natural order emerges organically over time as a consequence of links. File/folder structures need regular maintenance or they become less organized over time.
Doesn't it just get messy and overwhelming after a while? I visualize it as nodes and edges, but where the edges don't really mean anything specific other than "this makes me think of that".
I feel like a system that supported a lot of different types of edges that each had clear meaning would be more useful. "this requires that" and "this supports that" and "this needs to happen after that" or "this blocks that", etc.