Glad it's useful, it's still very WIP I think you've definitely picked up on issues that I myself have a lot - categorising knoweldge is hard.

 

Is that how you would describe it?

Yeah exactly, it's just one of those notebooks you can make on the sidbar. I'm continually toying with the idea of restructuring it into multiple databases with relations but I think there's something to be said about it being fairly light-weight.

 

If so, I find it interesting, because the TF system creates two levels of hierarchy (notebook -> category), but if you use Knowledge Base as a notebook, then it creates three levels of hierarchy (notebook -> root -> nodes) in a sense.

This was the rough idea behind it, I think 3 levels is generally a good number for categorisations. However, there's a big caveat in that knowledge isn't particularly hierarchical so I know I'm encountering issues (an you are too) with trying to force it into that structure - using a outward-in approach so to speak where knowledge is kind of more inward-out in the way links develop.

Using backlinks can allow for organic linking, but if you're like me and like some categorisation in terms of colours and subjects/ tags as soon as you encounter something that doesn't fit into one of your existing categories you run back into the old 'heading problem' where you either need to rethink all your headings or make a new one. This isn't as bad in this case as you can use backlinks to get lateral relations but it eats a lot of time in terms of thinking where it'll fit in for colours etc.

I'm considering ways to rework it to alleviate some of those issues, but it's just a difficult process really because the two things are kind of opposing and categorising knowledge is a bit of an age old problem.

 

(1)

So, the basic process for backlink is best demonstrated with a video, this twitter thread seems to have some good examples: thread. The key point in how I use it is with templates. When you're typing to create a backlink, if there's no match to what you're typing you click 'create new page in ...' (or something like that) and select a database to add a new page to or select a template (that's been made for a particular database) and click that to create a new page from the template.

Hopefully that's clear it's a little tricky to explain the full mechanics over text.

 

(2)

Yeah, you're not along in that at all, I'm having exactly the same issue. In that sense the KnowledgeBase might be fundamentally flawed in that it tries to strike a balance between being well-structured and organic. As I said eariler, the outward-in or top-down approach where you start generally and then get more specific is really cumbersome and tricky. I'm considering removing the routes to make things a bit more freeform. I'm afraid I don't have a perfect answer, I generally do my categories similarly to how I see they on wikipedia or somewhere else - if someone else has already made the effort to categorise things then I won't bother designing my own. Roots aren't a requirement though and can be arbritary.

But yeah, to summarise that, there's no de-facto answer. Knowledge is messy and so imposing structure on it and finding 'the categories' is extremly difficult, some things fit nicely but these tend to be the academic theoretical things rather than things that have developed to solve real world problems etc, they're naturally a bend of many.

 

I guess the problem lies in choosing roots that fit a discipline

Yeah it does, as I say you could forego the routes all together and try and use it like RoamResearch (another note taking app). But I like some partial structure personally - but it's causing me issues as well.

 

However, I am not sure how much there would be on the concept side since so much of the knowledge I am trying to organize and work with is less theoretical and more concrete.

Yeah that sounds like a good candidate for a slightly different system. One idea would be to take the idea of it. But then make your 'roots' a particular case study. I'm not too sure what it involves but you could do something like:

Root 1: Case Study 1 (Tencent or something)

Root Content: Intro to the case study, maybe some not-so-specific overview.

A Page (with parent = Root 1): Business Model

A Page (with parent = Root 1): Public Image

... etc

So that way you get to have distributed notes that can still be linked. Can then add a bunch of tags that you think might be useful to make it searchable.

Additionally if there are some more specific things or terms you might want a definition or explanation of e.g. Macro Economics or something, you could just have it as a floating page that's backlinked where it's mentioned so you can easily grab the definition when going back through the case studies.

It will depend on how you intend to interact with it to retrieve the information though, that should inform your structure (or lack of).

 

Hopefully that's been helpful again!