JEJeff_Brown·Aug 24, 2020
The issue at the heart of both the Zettelkasten and the PARA methods seem to be that a person wants their notes to be connected in useful ways. To an extent, "ordinary" knowledge graphs permit this -- where by "ordinary" I mean that the edges are unlabeled. Things are related to other things, but you have to infer the relationship yourself after looking at both of its members.
Graphs with labeled edges seem clearly better. But then what if you want a relationship with more than two members? (Or less! "Not" and "maybe" are two important unary relationships.)
And what if you want a relationship's members to themselves be relationships? This is the nature, after all, of most information. Any but the simplest sentence is a relationship between relationships. "Children ask for cookies because cookies have sugar", for instance, is a "because" r
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elationship bewteen an "ask for" relationship and a "have" relationship.
Once you've reified your relationships that way, you'd like to be able to search intelligently through them. "Ordinary" knowledge graphs let you see all of a thing's children, or parents, or maybe in some cases all it's descendents and ancestors up to some level of recursion. Better would be something that lets you ask targeted questions, like "Show me everything Sally has asked me to do that does not require a computer."
To my knowledge there's only one program that lets you reify your data and query it in the ways I've described. It's called Hode, for Higher Order Data Editor. I wrote it.
https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/hode