Interesting! I actually think of it with entirely different semantics. Your way of approaching it is perfectly fine, but I’ll explain my thinking as well, since I think it provides some different advantages:
Basically, I think in terms of “Link Group” as a noun phrase (Family Members), rather than “Relationship Type” as a verb phrase (is married to).
I ask myself “What group does the linked file belong in, from the perspective of the current file?” rather than forming a sentence “File A agrees with File B.”
Some examples:
- [[John Smith::Family Members]] - John Smith is a Family Member (to this person).
- [[LINKID::Supporting Ideas]] - The linked file is a Supporting Idea (of this idea).
- [[LINKID::Consequences]] - The linked idea is a logical Consequent of this idea.
The main reason I think this way is to make my system more conveniently structured for future searches.
When I come back to an old file in my system, I find it more natural to say:
- Show me all of this note’s Supporting Ideas.
- Who are this person’s Family Members?
- What are the Consequences of this idea?
Rather than:
- Show me all files linked with relationship type “is related to”
- Show me all files linked with relationship type “agrees with”
- Show me all files linked with relationship type “logically implies”
It is an extra mental step to ‘nounify’ relationship types (“agrees with”) into link groups (“Supporting Ideas”), but it’s an extra step that I find healthy for long-term clarity and organization in my system. It forces me to ask bigger questions about the structural outline of the information I’m mapping and how many types of relationships I actually want to track.
I much prefer to have a few organized groups (“Family Members”, “Hobbies”, “Professions” etc.) over an unmanageable number of semantic relationships (“is married to”, “is the son of”, “is the father of”, “plays the sport”, “studies the field of”, “frequently travels to”, “works as a”, “freelances as a” etc.).
Of course, this is just my way of thinking, and I’m consciously choosing to sacrifice some specificity to gain long-term simplicity and scalability.
Like I said, your method is great as well
Just wanted to put mine out there as an option, in case someone else resonates with it
P.S. Hilariously though, after all that explanation, I really wouldn’t mind placing the link type first as you mentioned. It makes little difference to my thinking approach, since I’m not using sentences to type my links.