How sources, content, topics, concepts, collections, and maps of content are linked

I just wanted to share my map of how I am setting up my vault in case it helps anyone else think through how they want to setup theirs. I’m still tweaking and setting things up. I’ll post a video once I have a fuller setup.

DevonThink
I’m going to store all resources in DevonThink. These could be YouTube videos, podcasts, websites, articles, images, videos, book highlights, document, presentations, PDFs, social media posts, messages, content from MOOCS (courses), or code (or at least bookmarks to repos). I used to use Evernote and Onenote but their formats are too locked in. They aren’t flexible or future proof. DevonThink can index and search documents better for helping me find things on purpose or make happy discoveries. It had better metadata and can OCR images and documents (also better for search).

Reference Manager
I haven’t picked a reference manager yet, but I’m leaning towards Zotero. I like that it pulls the descriptions out of videos and is open source and free. I am not an academic, but I would like to cite sources when I make post or videos as best I can.

Source
For almost every piece of content I put in my vault, I will have another note about the source. A source could be a YouTube channel, author, the show a podcast episode was created for, an organization/client I am working with, a creator, or a programmer. The source page has an overview of the source and has links to each note of content they have produced.

Content
Content notes are just the highlights, thoughts, and notes I have on a piece of content. The actual resource material is in DevonThink. I think the only exception is for meeting notes. Those only live in Obsidian.

Topics
Each piece of content has many topics in it. It might contain data science, python, and statistics all in one article. Topics are usually a backlink. It could be a smaller topic like numpy or just how to use arrays in numpy. Information about numpy is aggregated from many pieces of content on to the numpy note through embeds. Topics notes are probably best thought of remixes of concepts found in content notes. The same concept could be used on several topic pages. Topic pages also have my own thoughts and ideas about the concepts and how they connect.

Concepts
There are closer to the atomic notes. These are probably just a paragraph or bullet point. This is mostly to be remixed (embedded) a few places. This could also probably be turned into a flash card.

Other Connections
Maps of content are a way to navigate. There are usually groupings of topics or sources or pieces of content.
Tags can actionable like “ToDo”, “ToRead”, “ToLink” or give priority to something or cast wider nets than a topics would.
Filters are ways to find and rearrange notes without changing or adding any structure.
Graph view helps see existing connections.

Creation
My projects are broken down in to long terms (2 months to infinity) and short term. I log my progress, link things I’ve learned, and link any creations (these might be outside of Obsidian like pieces of code or videos).
One off content like this post is also put in the creation section.

I hope this helps and would love to hear thoughts and what others are doing. Thanks.

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