Contextualise: Manage your knowledge
github.com
github.com
Essentially, Luhmann had one small card per semantic unit. Cards had alphanumeric IDs. Cards backlinked to other cards using said IDs. He also used a card branching mechanism implemented in IDs as e.g. 123 -> 123a -> 123a1 which he called Folgezettel.
Lastly, he also had cards whose role was mostly to connect topics by serving as a link hub.
It's a really simple system that you can implement using plain text, Org, Markdown or some note taking application like Apple Notes or OneNote plus a few conventions.
After trying many things, for personal use I think nothing beats plain text (or a plain text format). I don't need a server, I can easily sync things, and it's really future proof.
I have also scaled this kind of setup to larger organizations, albeit using a more classical wiki-like approach (read longer articles instead of small semantic unit cards). For example, GitLab has excellent continuous integration. You can use an Emacs or Pandoc inside a Docker to export Org or Markdown files into an HTML.
It's an interesting problem domain that I think benefits from having so many people approach it from different directions, like the person you mention, OP, and all the people that hack on GTD apps, or org-mode customizations, etc etc.
I don't really have any valuable insight in this, just a mishmash of documents with TODOs, notes, plans and knowledge. I wonder how disruptive it would be if we had a highly focused AI that really understood how to organize people?
A great feature of Org are programmatic views of your data, possibly from many files at the same time. Some are already implemented, but still customizable, like Org Agenda. I use Org Agenda to have a Kanban-like view of my projects. I can simply see all WIP tasks, approaching deadlines and events in a little plain text window.
That's, I think, the minimum viable productivity system. You have a list of projects with tasks, some deadlines, some events and some inbox. You select a few tasks to do every day, like Ivy Lee suggested, and you do them. You want to see these plus deadlines and scheduled events which can be easily achieved with Org Agenda.
A GTD-like system would tag tasks with contexts, and offer some context-specific views, but I find that's too much work. Another pitfall of GTD, in my opinion, is that it doesn't encourage WIP limits which eventually makes it overwhelming.
I credit GTD with popularizing the need for an inbox, the task-centric view to time management, and the distinction between tasks, tasks with deadlines and events. But I think GTD leads to too much planning waste, projects broken into tasks that get constantly outdated.
I think the obstacle is more on the authoring side (how to build/edit graphs as easily as plain documents). There is also standard taxonomy challenges, about choosing the "types" of the nodes and the associations (values of the `instance_of` of the `Association`s in TopicDB). If the platform restricts things to a fixed taxonomy, you lose expressiveness, but on the other hand if you let users create any-which category they want things can grow quickly out of hand).
A related project in that space is https://metacademy.org/ whose code is here https://github.com/metacademy/metacademy-application
I was working on an app similar to contextualize a while back, but had to pause because of other projects, but I hope to come back to it soon. I hand't gotten very far on it, so maybe I can contribute to contextualize. My main focus is on building tools for serialization/deserialization of the graph data to a text-based format that can be stored in git repos so that multiple authors can collaborate on building out a knowledge base using pull requests, see data fixtures here https://github.com/minireference/structure-api/tree/master/d... )
Literally just last night I was lamenting that there was no open-source software similar to Roam (roamresearch.com) and how I didn't even know where to start if I were to make it myself.
This is a great option, I can't wait to try it out!
Thanks for your feedback. Genuinely appreciated.
Similarly, sometimes there can be multiple social relations between characters within a narrative setting; somebody might be both a friend and a parent, for example. Properly modelling this requires allowing multiple distinct edges between vertices.
And, finally, technically any hypergraph with path equivalence is a category.
When I'm doing narrative analysis on a whiteboard, the diagrams that I draw are category-theoretic, not graph-theoretic, and I'd like to be able to bring that richness into my narrative-mapping tool without having to flatten everything down into annotated graphs.
I see this tool as conceptually useful, but like most knowledge graphs I still don't see the inherent process behind the transformation and relation of various nodes.
Is there a layer I'm missing from the overview?
Although the above features do not make for the complete process you are referring to, at least they assist users as part of that process.
Food for thought.
As a knowledge manager, one of my biggest issues is the temporal nature of knowledge and conveying the cyclical nature of inputs and outputs to people. The "clean" process is often the exception in the real world, and short circuiting often occurs throughout the knowledge development process.
I don't think it really becomes apparent until you've been looking at the same knowledge for a while and start to see there's a pattern above the pattern. Changes in one part of the graph seem to be connected to changes in another part of the graph.
I'm searching for a way to visualize this extra dimension of data. I don't know if graph edges are complex enough to show the dimensionality of the change.
Perhaps a simple time-lapse overview of a graph would provide what I'm looking for. Or maybe there's a temporal relational layer that sits above topics and resources. I'm not sure.
edit: Hmm. A hypergraph seems like a relevant analogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraph
edit: Yep. The integrated bitemporality definitely lays the foundation that would be necessary to implement knowledge hypergraphs.
It's still a bit clunky but allows me more freedom to organize as I see fit. Plus, being a public page forces me to consider readability.