Hello, I’m new to Obsidian and the forum. I have spent a number of years using my own note taking system based on my own methodologies. My notes have notations for links, embedded text, key-value pairs, etc. While the notes themselves are free-form text, the log is highly structured so that it is an unambiguous grammar. I started work on a web page for searching, visualizing and analysis of the notes. When I discovered Obsidian, I realized that it is based on similar design philosophies. One big difference, though, is that all of my text notes are in a single file, and it supports the concept of a log of logs. While that might sound nuts, when you consider that the line limit on vim is a billion lines, I’ll never get there. Things are structured such that I can find anything quickly. My wife is always amazed when she asks me a question and I can get the answer in seconds via regular expression searching of my notes. I’ve been using “hash tags” before the term ever existed, except mine are hierarchical, allowing me to search for specific subcategories with a single regex in vi. External documents (pdf’s, receipts, etc.) are kept in a folder hierarchy that mirrors the tag hierarchy. The links are in the notes. If I need to see a document, I simply copy the link from the note, and paste it onto the end of the “open” command on a Mac, and the document is rendered in the appropriate tool.
So where am I going with all of this? Obsidian looks great, but I’m trying to wrap my head around how I would represent an order of events. Linking is great, and I do a ton of it in many contexts, but humans also experience things as a sequence of events. For example, “I don’t remember when we did X, but it was after event Y.” My daughter has been having some severe skin issues. I’ve taken lots of timestamped notes as things progress. By simply finding all of the entries associated to her, via a hierarchical tag such as:
medical.nancy.dermatology
I can see a chronological list of entries that represents the history and pathology of the problem that I can review with the doctor.
I have considered making each tag in my system to be a separate note in Obsidian, but my system supports the notion of a note having multiple tags, so that doesn’t work. What I am looking for is ideas regarding how I could represent a chronology in Obsidian. Of course I’d like to use the other linking capabilities of Obsidian, but sometimes I really need to see a set of notes as a chronology. I’m also thinking that each of my notes needs to be put into Obsidian as a separate note, with the timestamp as the title / file name. That would be an easy way to get the data into Obsidian, and I can do that by writing a simple script to separate the notes and write out the individual files. But once in Obsidian, I don’t know how I find notes as a chronology if necessary. Suggestions are welcome, and thank you.