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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

I always feel like "creating relationships" in a tool misses the point in a way. Those relationships need to be _in your head_ in order to be useful, not in some tool, or else you're spending too much time and energy on maintaining the graph, and derive little to no value from having it.

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After having tried Roam, as well as Zettelkasten and Bullet Journalling, I'm starting to think you're right. I keep searching for a magic tool to help me organise all my reading and research. But I think it's about 90% procrastination.

The beauty of Roam-style approach is that most of the work of updating the graph is implicit - you just reference a tag or a keyword, and it automatically gets connected with all other instances of that keyword (with context).

And explicit block referencing is near effortless too, though I do agree that there you can run into issues with the structure becoming obsolete and useless over time (I know I did).

Things can have a lot of relationships - databases for instance, it's good to have something remember it for you, and to show other people.

Databases operate at a much lower semantic level though, so it's not a good analogy IMO.

There are many examples:

Biochemical pathways: https://www.roche.com/sustainability/philanthropy/science_ed...

Financial market trades

Suppliers for the parts of a car

Electrical networks

Data networks

Neural networks

Metabolic networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_network

Electronic components

Fields of mathematics

History of mathematics / politics

etc

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