Obsidian Bases and Properties
This is a quick blurb about the release of Obsidian.md new core plugin ‘Bases'. The plugin enables you to transform your vault into a searchable and navigable database, utilizing properties as the primary query method. Needless to say, I feel a little vindicated, given I have had discussions and argued that Obsidian is more than a Personal Knowledge Management system, but a data management program. You can read about my thoughts on this in Theorizing the Vault. Again, not to gloat, but I do feel vindicated. However, this new plugin has brought to light a problem — a moderate issue, I need to contend with, and that is Tags.
Why, you may ask? Briefly, I put tags in the main body of each note. This allows effective navigation of my Open-Access Notebook (OAN). I do not include tags in my properties or front matter because I do not want to double-count them. For example, if I put the tag #Byzantine in the body of my text and properties, it counts as two tags, not the note being tagged once with #Byzantine. It seems trivial, but in my vault sidebar, where I have all my tags listed, I want the tags to correspond with the number of notes — if that makes sense. Obsidian also plans to integrate the plugin into Obsidian Publish, which I assume would allow people online to create databases from, for example, my OAN, potentially leading to misrepresentation of the number of notes created associated with the tag. Again, this is speculative but for my project is a bit of a concern moving forward.
With all that said, it will be trial by fire and I intend to integrate a tag property into all of my notes. This will be tedious as I have hundreds of notes with hundreds more still to be inputted. This is part of the delay in creating new posts for the RH Notes microblog. I need to sort a few items out about making a note. For now, my blurb about properties in 'Populating Your Note' may need to be revisited, and I will write a new post once I've had a chance to explore the Bases core plugin a bit more.
