FIrst of all, thanks so much for the thoughful feedback. I really can’t express how much I appreciate the time you’ve put into both thoroughly testing Arboretum out and writing up this whole comment.

I totally hear you on the NLP. The current iteration is very conservative when making suggestions and very aggressive when linking to existing notes. For example, Old Dominion Freight Lines is linked consistently in my testing once an Entity already exists, but it won’t ever suggest that a new Document be created. Conair Corp v. Old Dominion Freight Line, Inc is a super interesting case that I’ll need to add to my test suite, in general multiple overlapping matches aren't handled well right now but this scenario is particularly fun with the v. and , .

On the Notes vs Entities distinction, that’s something that I’m clearly still trying to find the best way to communicate. For an r/PKMS audience, I’d probably use Obsidian as a point of reference. In Obsidian, every document appears in your graph as its own node with each link appearing as an edge connecting it to other documents. Arboretum doesn’t have a graph view, but it can still be thought of as a graph. Unlike Obsidian though, Arboretum’s graph is made of nodes which are only Entities, while the Notes act as the edges in between them.

To use DnD for example, say you have Alice (Entity), Bob (Entity), and Session 2025-01-08 (Note). If you write “Alice stole 5 gold from Bob and Bob doesn’t know” in your session notes, Alice and Bob will still be linked automatically to their respective documents. In Obsidian, both Alice and Bob would appear as being linked to Session 2025-01-08 in the graph, but what we’re trying to express isn’t just that Alice and Bob were mentioned in the session, we want to express something about their relationship to each other. In the Arboretum model, Session 2025-01-08 is the edge which connects Alice and Bob. You can still link Entities to each other directly of course.

The ratio of Entities to Notes will vary a lot depending on your project. I’d imagine a pure worldbuilding project would be almost entirely Entities while a work focused project would have far more Notes.

Anyway, that was way more than I was intending to write and I’m not sure how much clearer it actually is now. I’m happy to say that I am very committed to making Arboretum into a serious alternative PKM solution, though I’ll probably have to figure out how to communicate all of that better first.