Changing the level of abstraction

I’m new to Obsidian so maybe there is a way to do this.

A powerful feature for any knowledge management system would be to enable linking at different levels of abstraction/granularity.

A map is a higher level abstraction of a territory. Navigation is a mix of operating at the higher level map level and the lower level territory level.

The same seems to be true for any knowledge system. There is the whole and the parts and zooming in and out of both is important.

As best as I can tell, Obsidian organizes notes into titled pages. A page aggregates linked and unlinked contet. Links help to form connections between other pages. So when you look at the graph, you see the pages and the links between pages. But what if you want to get more meta? What if, for example you want to create categories of pages and link the page categories rather than the pages themselves? Imagine changing the level of abstraction so you can briskly move between knowledge areas where each knowledge area contains many pages.

Put differently, imagine creating abstraction layers on your data with each layer capable of linking between the other entities at that layer.

One implementation might be extending the functionality of tags. Right now, tags help to group multiple notes. But how cool would it be if you could create a graph of your tags and create links between the tags. Then you could zoom between aggregations and see their connection and also zoom into any given set of aggregations.

So, best I understand, Obsidian enables lower level linking but there is an opportunity for linking at a higher level of abstraction (e.g. at the tag level).

What do people think?

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Isn’t this what MOC ( Map of Content) does? There were a lot of discussion about this.
Maybe I’m not fully understand what you are saying but I have MOCs connected to other MOCs

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For more on MOCs – one of the canonical threads here on the topic:

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Thx Mafsi. Maybe I’m missing something but all the linking in Obsidian is between pages.
#tags aggregate pages but there is no graph of tags. Is it possible to see a knowledge graph of your tags rather than just your pages?.

Also, there can be different levels to tags. Wondering if there is a way to zoom in and out of the levels.

For example Imagine tags: #Country, #City.
Say you have relations you track at different levels. For example, imports and exports by continent, country, city. So, for example US may export grain to various countries in Europe and import consumer goods from various countries in Europe. You may want to see aggregate trading at the country level or the city level.
Can you do this kind of relational graphing at different levels of abstraction?

No, but it’s been requested: Better tag visualization in graph view: show links between tags, resize tags based on mention - #12 by Abdulsalam

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I may not have understood your approach, especially since I have to translate, not being an English speaker.

We could imagine, for each tag, creating a page with the name of this tag (#City => City.md, etc…).

And in these “tag-pages” list all the pages referring to the tag.

Would that work?

It would take a script to automate it, because manually tedious.

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I’m not using #tags very much, only to point the note in a direction. Those kind of relationship I build them with MOC. Download this kit in order to see that kind of map (MOC) and how is related to other map.

Thanks Nato. Sounds promising. I suppose it would help to see what it actually is like in implementation especially for someone not well versed in building custom automated scripts

Thx Mafsi, will do