I just posted an idea about something I have been calling Equivalents which is a way to find instances of and relationships between little meta ideas that appear in two or three or four word ideas appearing in the middle of sentences. the same idea may be referred to by different word constellations depending on who’s referring to the idea or in what context or through what lens something is being seen.
I need something more powerful than a tag but in situations where a full note is not needed or would not create the bridges.
I feel like there should be a file in the vault or perhaps even obsidian-wide that allows per line Equivalents to be made.
it would be nice to be able to select two or three or four words and tell obsidian that this specific constellation of words represents an idea that is also known by other specific constellations of different words and represent or are related to the same idea expressed differently or by different persons or in a slightly different scope, but are a related idea.
so if you could imagine while creating a note, you could select four words, and tell obsidian that you want to create an equivalent, this would automatically surround the words with a unique markup to encapsulate those words, and obsidian would ask you to create / search for an Equivalent. when you type in a two or three or four word phrase or even a single word that is considered to be an equivalency it would add the phrase to the equivalents file on the same line as the other equivalent phrases.
imagine the chess club and the checkers club and the anti-checkers club all referred to the same idea using three different phrases. and you want to be able to find those related ideas similarly to how you find relationships through single word tags.
imagine the checkers club refers to this idea as a “zip zerb zap”, the chess club calls it a “jolly 240”, and the anti checkers club can’t stand this thing and calls it a “jackery widget woppit flummis”…
if these things are written about and included in different notes because it would make sense to do so, it would be great to have an equivalence file in the background that allows for keeping track of these and indicating their existence and relationship using hidden markup, but some sort of an unobtrusive visual clue in the note.
now “zip zerb zap” has already been written about in one note, but now you’re off in another note and you are about to mention the “jolly 240”… you would just select the words jolly 240 and through the menu, or markup, tell obsidian that jolly 240 is an Equivalent, and if it can already find the equivalent in the equivalence file it will go ahead and add the markup around it and show the visual representation that there is an equivalent or number of equivalents. or in the same way that you create links to notes, while you are creating an Equivalent, it asks you to search for the Equivalent phrase within the Equivalents.md file and automatically shows you near matches or matches, or if none are found and selected, you would press enter to create the equivalents phrase, and that equivalent phrase plus jelly 240 would be added to the same line in the Equivalents file. so you tell it that you want to create an equivalent for jolly 240, and then start typing in zip zerb zap, if zip zerb zap already exists on a line in the equivalents file, and you press enter, then obsidian will add jolly 240 to the zip zerb zap line in the equivalents file. and both of these equivalents will exist on the same line for lookup.
a few days later you find yourself copying and pasting some information into a third note from the anti-checkers club and notice the phrase jackery widget woppit flummis, and realize you would like to connect it to the other two phrases, you would just select those four words until obsidian you want to create an equivalent, or whatever we’re going to call it such as meta tag, or idea, or molecule, or whatever name expresses this concept of the best, and when obsidian asks you what you want to mark it up as an equivalent to, you can either start typing zip, or jolly, and you should see one of those word clusters showing up as an equivalent suggestion, and when you select it, it will add “jackery widget woppit flummis” to that same line in the equivalent.md file.
maybe this concept is meta tagging.
this could also be used to cover all of the cases where a one-word tag has different plurality or ownership or tenses.
#fish #fishes #fishies #fish’s etc…