I’ve also discussed semantic links (or “qualified links” as I’ve previously called them) over at the zettelkasten.de forums. There, I’ve suggested the following link type syntax:
Similar to semantic citations used by Pandoc Scholar, Markdown links could incorporate a relationship type like this:
[[type:link]]
[[link description|type:link]]
[link description](type:link)
Examples:
The ideas in this note are further extendend in [[is_extended_by:20201113]].
These statements question the conclusion that [backlinks are useful](critiques:Why_backlinks_are_useful.md)
Reading the comments in this thread, I think that the use of double colons (i.e., [[type::link]]) may be even better, since its used elsewhere already and is likely easier to parse. Also, a rather unique sequence has less chance of colliding with other uses (e.g., single colons in bibliographic citekeys, like miller:2019).
For bibliographic citations and links between literature notes, the CiTO ontology could be used which already offers a comprehensive set of relationship types. Software could offer these relationship types via autocompletion when composing a link.
The use of semantic links would allow software to label connections in graph visualizations, or to filter a graph by a certain relationship type. These are just a few examples, of course.
IMO semantic links have a huge potential to further advance what knowledge management software can do.