Building a Knowledge Tree

Obsidian Bookmarks

Bookmarks are the key to effectively using Obsidian as a non-relational database. The virtues of approaching your notes this way are several, and I covered some in Freeing Your Thinking. In this article, I want to develop the idea of using Bookmarks to construct flexible, interactive Knowledge Trees to organize notes. Just as a reminder, we are organizing information, not files.

The Navigation tab gives at best a static arrangement of information, while the Bookmarks tab provides a dynamic way to interact with, develop and access your information. Here you can create Views of your information which you can organize by domain, subject, activity, etc. Views are saved search filters, or queries. Your information, unlike your files, can happily exist in multiple places in your Knowledge Tree.

When you begin to build your Knowledge Tree, you might start by creating views which map to your current directories using filters. After all, you want to preserve the information you have put into your vault by organizing your notes in a file tree. Most people have a separate directory for fleeting notes, so you might make a view containing path: "fleeting-note-directory". But is such a view terribly useful? Browsing through all your fleeting notes is fun if you've nothing better to do, but it's not focused or efficient use of time if you are working on a particular topic. Wouldn't it be better to just see the fleeting notes related to my topic? So I save the filter My Topic \type:: fleeting\…