Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Atomic Notes for Personal Knowledge Graphs

I came across the work of Ivo Velitchkov on Personal Knowledge Graphs yesterday.  Some of it goes well beyond my current level of comprehension because of the technical aspects but I enjoyed the more conceptual elements and the history of the evolution of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). 

Digging deeper into technology-enhanced notetaking made me question the way I take notes and whether I need to make better use of some of the more advanced functionalities of TiddlyWiki, and by extension, TiddlyMap.  In particular, transclusion seems to offer ways to create more atomic notes.  

For example, taking notes on a book I am reading in a single page or Tiddler) could result in a very long page with many different ideas.  I can tag the page with keywords but I want to be able to quickly reference specific elements of my notes.  I want to be able to quickly pull a specific visual.  The way to do that is by creating "atomic notes" that are then transcluded in the page for that book.  Each atomic note becomes a node in the graph, with its own properties and relationships to other nodes. 


Created by DALL.E:  Atomic Notes in the Context
of a Personal Knowledge Graph 4/24/2024.


This exploration into note taking also made me wonder whether it would be worth revisiting all kinds of paper-based notebooks I have accumulated over the years into my growing TiddlyMap.  The first notebook I came across is a small notebook meant to capture quotes.  I know I also have collections of quotes in other TiddlyWikis.  Bringing everything together (with a focus on the key themes I have already identified) would be a very integrative exercise.

Another question worth exploring is whether it would be possible to integrate personal knowledge graphs with enterprise knowledge graphs.  That is, to some extent, what the Microsoft Graph does and how Microsoft Copilot for M365 pulls content from individual employees' email, Teams, files, and combines that with whatever enterprise content the individual employee also has access to.  

What if there were a way to structure OneNote notebooks for atomic notes and a personal knowledge graph?  What if that personal knowledge graph could be integrated into an enterprise knowledge graph?  I am not suggesting that a personal knowledge graph be share with the enterprise.  I am only suggesting that an individual employee should have easy access to their own personal graph, the enterprise knowledge graph, AND external graphs (like Google's Knowledge Graph) through a single interface. 

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