Clustering note names

[Grasshopper]

Hi there,

I am simply wanting to find clusters of notes that are grouped by similar names. I am not interested in the contents of these notes or their links/backlinks/tags etc. I just want to automatically find clusters of notes based on the name of the note. In this way I can minimise note duplication. The results should generate clusters like these:

Cluster: lifestyle
lifestyle issues
exciting lifestyle
lifestyle food
diseases of lifestyle

Cluster: cream
creamy soup
ice cream
creamed

I have searched and searched and haven’t found a method or a plugin to get this done. The plugins ‘Smart Connections’ and ‘Graphview Analysis’ simply don’t do this unfortunately in my understanding.

I do not want to manually type the keyword because I sometimes don’t know the names of the notes I have created many months ago in the first place! If I were to manually type it, then I can use the search function. I want Obsidian to automatically cluster. Any thoughts please? Thanks very much.

[anon23099027]

I use Dataview to identify clusters of files based on parts of their file names:

```dataview
TABLE
WHERE contains(file.name, "lifestyle")
LIMIT 50
```

Would that work for you?

Or perhaps an inline query:

```query
file:lifestyle
```

[Grasshopper]

Thanks, but not really.

With this query, I have to specify the keyword, isn’t it? The thing is I don’t remember all the note names I have created ages ago. The point is to get Obsidian to scan my vault and cluster based on the most commonly used note names.

[anon23099027]

Apologies. I misread your original post. Don’t know a way to automate this. Hope someone can help.

[Grasshopper]

No worries. No need to apologise. Thanks for having a go at this!

[Yurcee]

don’t know of a plugin, sorry or write the script (i expect this to be not so easy as it looks…)

but for the future, it’s better to prepare for stuff like this and pepper the frontmatter with tags based on file name on file creation
so templater plugin would be your friend and i’ve just seen a similar thread:

Take the first X letters out of the title as a Tag

Hello there, is it possible to tell Obsidian, that the first X letters out of the title from a note, also created as a tag in the note itself? E.g.: The title of the note is like “1040, 10 XXX - XXX” and in the note I write in the first line the tags. In this case “#1040BF” and some more … Something lile #{{4:Title}}BF or so … I create the notes with the QuickAdd PlugInn. Thanks

personally, i don’t like tags with unnecessary or surplus information but makes life easy when querying files

[holroy]

I guess one way of dealing with this is to loop through all files and split the lowercased file name into words, and then make a dictionary using a single word as key. In the end each key would then hold all filenames having that word as part of its name.

Next step would be to skip all stopwords, or have a exclusion list of non-interesting word. Or possibly trying to guess and change all words into singular (or plural).

To list the clusters sort the dictionary according to how many filenames for any given word.

---

Actually this should be doable true a pure Dataview query, I think… what do the following untested query give:

```dataview
TABLE rows.file.link as Files
FLATTEN split(lower(file.name), "\s*") as word
GROUP BY word
SORT length(rows) desc
LIMIT 20
```

This should theoretically give you the 20 clusters with the most filenames related to that word…

[Grasshopper]

Thank you. Newbie to Dataview queries to be honest…where do I copy-paste the above query in please? I have Dataview installed.

[holroy]

It’ll generate a table when you’re in live preview or reading mode instead of the code. So place it in the text where you want to see the result.

[Grasshopper]

Thanks @holroy. Unfortunately it doesn’t work yet.

This is what I get when I run the code:

• It generates a list of more than 20 items despite the code saying to generate only 20 items.
• The entries are the names of my notes.
• Some notes have multiple entries i.e., the exact same note name may be repeated five or six times, which shouldn’t be the case since Obsidian doesn’t allow two notes to have identical names.
• I didn’t see entries e.g., ‘sleep’ and ‘sleepy’ and ‘asleep’ immediately next to each other, i.e., clustered together which is the whole purpose of the exercise.

Here’s a screen-shot of my results:

Anything we could do to tinker the code a bit more please? Thank you very much!

[Grasshopper]

Thanks @Yurcee.

I create a large number of notes on the fly…that is when I write by enclosing the double square brackets. Engaging the templater plugin when my writing is in full flow is quite disruptive.