Advice on how to handle technical regulation note for engineering

Hello everyone,

I am a French engineer in the pipeline industry and I have a dilemma about how to properly organize my notes from various technical standards and regulations in my profession. My goal is to have an overall view and to be able to, for example, search for concepts that are present in multiple standards and see their differences, as well as see all the concepts present in a single standard.

I am facing two problems:

  1. Very similar notions come from different standards but have some significant differences. These differences are important to detect.

  2. Since these are standards/laws, I prefer to directly copy the notions or paragraphs in full. If I summarize, I risk losing sometimes important nuances.

I can’t quite visualize the right methodology. I see three possibilities:

a) A large note in which I almost entirely copy the standard and tag the different notions in it.

b) A note per notion with a link to their original standard. So the note will contain several times the nearly same notion with a link to their standard source. But then, what should I put in the original standard note?

c) A note per article of standard in which I copy the text and tag the notion.

What do you think?

Thank you very much in advance.

Best regards,

Eric

Hello!

I would gravitate towards b) personally. It lets you focus on the parts of the standards you are interested in, so you don’t need to worry about putting the whole standard in your vault before you can start working. You get started quickly and you can always reorganize things later.

The issue you identify with b) is that you don’t know what to put in the note related to the standard. I would suggest:

  • A link to the pdf of the standard
  • Links to the preceding/superseding standards
  • Nothing at all! Personally I have a ton of blank notes in my vault that I use to identify mark external references. The note itself is empty, but its backlinks show me all the places where I made a reference within my vault.

Hope this helps

Thanks you for your quick answer.

I will try b) then and make an assessment in a couple of weeks.

Best regards
Eric

I am also an engineer who studies technical standards and regulations all the time.
option b) is the best for me. All small concepts from pdf are the unit of notes, and I will create additional notes to summary or compare these concepts.