How to put two things in Obsidian, one of which is contained in the other?

Knowledge management
2

Yes this is a tough question. I am using Obsidian for research as well and modeling more complex relationships between notes is something I wish I could do every once in a while.

My first thought is this. It’s not because the relationship is not exact that it is useful to model if precisely. You could work harder to model the relationships accurately, but will these efforts help you realize your projects in the long run?

If you do decide to better model the relationships between these notes, there are a few options.

This post has the seeds of a solution. What we are looking for is a way to label the links we make so that we can identify the relationship types. The first solution is to use the Dataview syntax and make links similar to

link_type:: [[LinkTarget]]

This does some of the work and Dataview will help you craft queries to exploit these annotations.

In the long run I believe what we are looking for are ontologies, and better tools to manipulate and edit them inside Obsidian.

One thing i’ve been experimenting with recently is using the Graphiz extension to create rough schemas of the ontologies I use in my notes. The diagram defines the relationships types I want to use. I note what they mean beneath the diagram. Then, when I use these relations in other notes, I make a link to the ontology page.

So if I try to replicate this experiment with the problem you pose, I would suggest

  • Make a diagram of all the entity types and their relationships in a note, for instance an [[Ontologies/Mouse]] note. Write down how the ontology works. For instance your ontology could define a “isModel” relationship type between the mouse and the applicable physics models.
  • Use the dataview syntax to make the relation: `isModel:: [[Physics Theory 2]]
  • Where you use the relation, you can optionally make a link to the ontology page. If yiu ever forget what isModel means you can always go back to the ontology note to remember what you meant.

Note that the next version of Obsidian will improve the way links are handled in Obsidian and the Dataview syntax might not be necessary anymore.

I hope this helps. I believe ontology tools could be very helpful for some things in obsidian, but parcimony is important because the notes can quickly become very confusing.