Org-roam is great for Zettelkasten style personal knowledge base wiki. It builds on org-mode and shows the backlinks that make a Roam database so useful.
For those of us struggling with just what Roam or Zettelkasten are, or are wondering why not just use a wiki: Roam is to a wiki what Markdown is to a text editor. That is to say it's a more focused usage of the editor, with helper functions designed to streamline the workflow that is part of the Roam/Zettelkasten "system"
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My own setup in Spacemacs (Emacs with Vim-like leader-key composed functions) is arranged around a Zettelkasten/Roam wiki with daily journal notes and TODO items. (Org-mode is a fantastically complex piece of code, listing its features for organization would take too long, but this has some: https://orgmode.org/features.html )
Daily note-taking is done in org-journal, with TODO items scattered in the notes. Creating a new day's note brings forward all the unfinished org-mode TODO items into the new document. More complex stuff gets linked to as an external document. Example: 2020-06-07.org may have an entry "Write new disaster recovery requirements" and within that entry have a link to the "ProjectName Disaster Recovery Requirements" document. The markup in org-mode for that task now that I'm working on it, looks like this:
* DOING [#A] Write new disaster recovery requirements
:LOGBOOK:
- State "NEXT" from "TODO" [2020-06-05 Fri 16:14]
- State "DOING" from "TODO" [2020-06-06 Sat 12:07]
:END:
[[file:~/Org/projectname_disaster_recovery_requirements.org][ProjectName Disaster Recovery Requirements]]
Now when I have the disaster recovery requirements file open, org-roam will show me which docs link to it. Which provides a big boost to my recall of important or associated things. For example the backlinks window shows me I linked to the disaster recovery doc from meeting notes a couple of months old. To refresh my memory I click through and read the meeting notes, to discover someone mentioned a new feature of our software that makes disaster recovery more difficult, or some new corporate policy that affects how we store backups, etc etc.
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Why should people care about this? In my opinion, it's because we as "computer people" have a vast amount of knowledge we are expected to be able to use on whatever problems we encounter in our work. I think we need all the help we can get to remember that knowledge and its relevance to a given situation or subject. I personally am pretty loose about how I write my personal knowledge base, I don't write theses or long-form articles with perfect bibtex references, but I do try to get what I'm doing into text form so I can search for it later on.
I'm excited to see how this "personal knowledge management" ecosystem grows and develops. We're only human but we're expected to manage godlike amounts of information.
https://org-roam.readthedocs.io/en/master/
Based on the really nice personal wiki style knowledge base at https://roamresearch.com/
For those of us struggling with just what Roam or Zettelkasten are, or are wondering why not just use a wiki: Roam is to a wiki what Markdown is to a text editor. That is to say it's a more focused usage of the editor, with helper functions designed to streamline the workflow that is part of the Roam/Zettelkasten "system"
----
My own setup in Spacemacs (Emacs with Vim-like leader-key composed functions) is arranged around a Zettelkasten/Roam wiki with daily journal notes and TODO items. (Org-mode is a fantastically complex piece of code, listing its features for organization would take too long, but this has some: https://orgmode.org/features.html )
Daily note-taking is done in org-journal, with TODO items scattered in the notes. Creating a new day's note brings forward all the unfinished org-mode TODO items into the new document. More complex stuff gets linked to as an external document. Example: 2020-06-07.org may have an entry "Write new disaster recovery requirements" and within that entry have a link to the "ProjectName Disaster Recovery Requirements" document. The markup in org-mode for that task now that I'm working on it, looks like this:
But is displayed like this: (That second line is a clickable link)Now when I have the disaster recovery requirements file open, org-roam will show me which docs link to it. Which provides a big boost to my recall of important or associated things. For example the backlinks window shows me I linked to the disaster recovery doc from meeting notes a couple of months old. To refresh my memory I click through and read the meeting notes, to discover someone mentioned a new feature of our software that makes disaster recovery more difficult, or some new corporate policy that affects how we store backups, etc etc.
----
Why should people care about this? In my opinion, it's because we as "computer people" have a vast amount of knowledge we are expected to be able to use on whatever problems we encounter in our work. I think we need all the help we can get to remember that knowledge and its relevance to a given situation or subject. I personally am pretty loose about how I write my personal knowledge base, I don't write theses or long-form articles with perfect bibtex references, but I do try to get what I'm doing into text form so I can search for it later on.
I'm excited to see how this "personal knowledge management" ecosystem grows and develops. We're only human but we're expected to manage godlike amounts of information.