Add support for link types

various potential ways to write various link types

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It will be a powerful way to gather thoughts

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what is this plugin?

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@cristian
Yas, plez!

This would be a fantastic way of resolving the arbitrary separation between creation and provenance, or more plainly content and its context.

“To be related, or not to be related…” that is not the question.

Instead:
“How are these things related?” - be it metadata, annotation, bidrectional-links, backlinks, outlinks, Dataview-dataz, human-un-friendly YAML-aml, aml, aml, aml…, or whichever flavor of unopinionatedly-opinionated markup language, it is all much ado about something.

The arbitrary arbitrage of separating the inseparable (content from all of its context) and then deciding the best way of displaying it (friction-ful side panels) or re-connecting it (cognitively burdensome) such that it may be useful seems less fruitful than developing an awareness of the inherent interconnectivity of all dataz, and working to reveal that which is extant in each note and its connections.

To disambiguate that which is not inherently ambiguous…

Oy… Forgive the salty prose.

Here’s hoping this will be the One Plugin to Rule Them All!

Thanks for keeping this hope alive since 7/2020!

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Any news in this area Dear Obsidies?

Still pining away for some flavor of functional disambiguation…

It must’ve felt similar to the early adopters of the motorized carriages back before cars replaced horse and buggy as the more robust or advanced means of transportation…

Bah Humbug… These hippies and their fancy ‘link types’… Silly fad I tell ya! Why, back in my day… We had to manually connect each little data giblet… By hand [right-click]! Uphill both ways [bidrectionally], in the snow, with no shoes on…
And we liked it!

~Quo, Status Esq.

There is such immense unrealized potential in managing knowledge digitally. It’s further inhibited by staid and discursive designs that needlessly separate inherently interconnected dataz, only to expend later effort to instantiate their newfound and illusory separateness by debating the best means of re-connecting and then re-presenting the now-disconnected…

Systems of thought would do well to recognize the organic, essential, and extant interconnections of all things and then design optimizations that reveal what’s already there.

Facilitate more dialogue in data, and less discourse and debate.

Autocatalytic knowledge conversion beats the clunky death by a thousand right clicks all of the days…

#right_click_wrong_click
#save_click_save_a_life

~gobs

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Any updates on your plugin?

This would be a fantastic tool!

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Agreed that link annotation ends up being better than some crossing-guard of a meta note cluttering things up.

This would be great for the issue of path intersection . https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/wxtjev/approaches_to_notes_in_multiple_thought_paths/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

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Hi Rishi,
I used TheBrain for years.

Link-Types in TheBrain
Pro
Definition of Link-Types are Supported including zoomable Icon, background-link-color
Activation is quite easy
Overwriting of the Link-Text is possible (and arrows too)
Link Notes (but no indicator that they exists in the graph)
Link-Type filtering is possible!! Very cool!
Con
no inline definition of a link (e.g. Linktype synonm has the symbol =, = NewNode1: would link the last active node0 to the new node1 with the link-type Synonym and = is shown on the link. e.g. ~ is the link type similar…<>…)
layers are missing, but with link-types there will be a workaround (if link-type filtering is possible of course).

Application:
I tried to get Philosphy into my second brain. And digitized the “Philomat”. So you have 12 layers, link-types and now you can filter the different view to the world (as a new philosphical interperetation).

Kind Regards

Possibly a different take, but I use the combination of

It allows me to define link types (for me in the front matter) using Juggle, and at the same time keep the types consistent through the autocomplete which I populate using a list of links I need (in my case foaf, dc and some word net).

The only thing I now need is a decent export/import of the juggling graph or a powerful query/reasoning tool to query over the juggl graph.

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Hi! What would be the representation you will use for such reasoning?

I would use the reasoning to infer relationships between entities I linked. Where is_parent would link back with is_child. Hence the goal to use formal ontologies, rather than thesauri. To enhance the PKG with more explicit linkage.

Obviously, only for front matter, for otherwise inline links would be a pain to reason over (I think).

But what about the inline variables that DataView uses? or another thing?

I want to do the same, reasoning, not only for the front matter. I recently wrote: GitHub - cristianvasquez/docs-and-graphs: Parse markdown into a simplified Abstract Syntax tree that extracts inline variables; I want to use them to generate RDF or Datalog to reason.

I think this is actually the best functionality for implement some kind of typed linking in Obsidian, indeed, and now i’m using it.

There are plugins that use them, such Excalibrain.

I think that if standard Obsidian graph would implement features like Excalibrain, it would become a killer feature

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Please forgive if my contribution does not fit well, I am a recent user.

I would really like typed-links that would work for all type of links, and especially block links.

Blocks are not yet first class objects , hence plugins do not usually provide block-level functionality, only note-level (e.g. ability to retrieve just the block that inlines a dataview variable would be great for me).

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I’m not certain if this is what you mean, but you can link directly to blocks, and also embed a single block using Obsidian.

More info here: Internal links - Obsidian Help

Although true, you can use block and section (header) links to reference in other notes, what is missing is any metadata about that link (particularly transclusions), a title for example. When using wikilinks format, the display text does not render. Our developers are aware if this. This topic (link types) would go far in addressing this issue, but full “first class” is not an easy thing to implement for a variety of reasons.

A proposal for rendering block embeds inline - #84 by writtenfool

+1 for the whole discussion.
Also, i would greatly appreciate the ability to customize the way different class of links show in graph view, like dotted/dotted line arrows, different colors, labels on the edges, invisible links. And it would be great to customise specific link on-the-fly without writing a specific class for a single link, like i did below.
My proposed non-invasive into the wikilinks notation type linking would be adding a json-like array of options, like: Ann [[Bob|likes Bob]]{color: "#00ff00", label: "likes", type: "--"} in the Ann.md for the dotted line green link with label “likes” between Ann and Bob. Or, as suggested above, something like Ann [[Bob::likes::|likes Bob]] where the ‘likes’ class specifications is stored somewhere in the options (maybe the same way as the json example).
I really looking forward to using this feature when/if it’s added.

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Is there any way to add a link without creating a link in the graph? Like, some kind of surface level link that simply points to another note without muddying up the whole thing? There are many things I’d like to link but don’t necessarily want the notes showing up in the graph because of it.

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I don’t think so. You could reference the name of the note without making a link to it—i.e., create the link and then remove the double-brackets surrounding the text. You’d then at least be able to refer manually to it. A sort of manual/mental link, if you will.

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Obsidian URL links won’t make a graph connection.

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