Question: Aspen in Obsidian

[cannibalflea]

I have been looking for many years for an application that would combine unstructured writing (complete with bi-directional links and transclusion, etc.) with more precise property relationships. While there has been an explosion of note/tools for thought apps that support unstructured text and graph-like relationship between blocks of text, none so far allow concrete definition of entities along with explicit relationships to other entities. As a fairly nontechnical person, I assume this is because it is a very difficult thing to do. However, I was wondering if aspen's approach might be a way of bringing this to tools like obsidian which are markdown based. I actually discovered aspen through obsidian community.

[beechnut]

Hey @cannibalflea, thanks for introducing me to Obsidian, I'd never heard about it before.

I do want Aspen to have a notebook-style editor for managing data in projects.

Can you tell me more about what you're looking for out of such an integration or feature, or could you describe your use case so I can get a clearer idea of what you're thinking?

Thanks!

[cannibalflea]

Hey @beechnut, Thanks for getting back to me and really sorry for not replying earlier. It has been a crazy couple of months.

I have to say I don't have a concrete vision for what this could be. However, I think one of the serious downsides to all the new note-taking/tools-for-thought/PKM tools is that they focus on making linking easy but they don't provide any structure on how the things that are linked together are actually related to each other. Adding to the confusion, there is no clear sense in any of the tools of what each container (file/page or even block) represents. I think a page or block is fine concept if you are just talking about thoughts, but when you start to represent people or places in your notes, there needs to be some sort of rigour to make the whole exercise sustainable long term. I think being able to simply link from a page about Christopher Wren to another page about St. Paul's Cathedral is fine but it would be much more useful if you could know that Wren was an architect and that he was the architect for St. Paul's. Right now, this context is not really available to the user without them reading the actual passage where the link is located. I find the graph views in these tools even more useless because you can't even tell the context for the relation.

I think one of the main issues preventing these tools from providing this more precise semantic relation building is the lack of a text-based/markdown language to denote it. The way Aspen's "tagging" is currently setup does not conform to Obsidian or WikiText style for linking, so there needs to be some thought on how to make sure that the markdown continues to provide the core functionality of linking between files (and backlinking) but is augmented to at least allow semantic relations to be constructed. Juggl is another effort in the same vein.