Is anyone looking at using Obsidian as a Portable KM rather than Personal LM

Knowledge management
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What mean by this - is anyone looking at zipping up a vault and using it a Portable KM.
In other words, rather than supply someone with a PDF user manual, you supply them with a PKM - it could contain diagrams and videos.

In my case, I am particular interested in the development of Strategic and Policy documents.
I have been involved in the writing of the Australian Robotics Roadmap, and for the next one, I was thinking whether this could be delivered as an Obsidian Vault.

Yes this could all be done on-line (on a Wiki) but I like the idea that it is self contained.

Thoughts!

2 Likes
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I don’t remember hearing of anyone using vaults exactly like that, but sometimes people offer vaults for download. Usually these are meant as templates, or a way to let people rummage thru one’s notes. There are some examples at 🗂️ Vaults - Obsidian Hub - Obsidian Publish. On the same site is a list of Obsidian Publish sites, which are published online but could just as easily be packaged up and distributed as vaults. I think more of those are less meta. Obsidian’s Help site itself is a Publish site.

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Thanks.

What is I was thinking is having a special zipped file (.okv - Obsidian Knowledge VaulT) that you could send as an attachment, or download as file. When you click on it, it would fire up Obsidian on your device, and you could browse the Vault. For the Users point of view it feels the same as firing up a PDF viewer.

Regards

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Just an extra point - for things like Policy and Strategy documents - people want a “document” that is Immutable. Having it online means that it can be changed. Of course we have the wonderful Wayback. But I can see a scenerio, where people want a copy of the “document” on their machine. I am trying to convince some very conservative people who would want to print the PDF.

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I see. I’m not sure how feasible a self-contained Obsidian vault-and-app is. An alternative if you don’t need Obsidian-specific functionality would be to export the vault as a website and package that up as an ePub or perhaps one of the web archive formats (I don’t know if any of those are widely openable without a special app.)

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You want the thing to be printable to PDF, or just to be something that would satisfy that sort of person? I suspect most ereader apps can’t print to PDF, so sadly that might rule out ePub.

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I’m very keen to have Obsidian functionality - the backlinks and the graphs.
The content needs to navigated and searched.

PS. I am looking at some very complex Australian defence strategies that are almost impossible to navigate though with a simple 200 page PDF. There are so many cross links. And then there are at least 20 other policy and strategy documents that are inter-related.

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Definitely not printable. Just something that would satisfy that sort of person.

They are currently happy with PDF - I just need to convince them to PDF is no longer suitable.
And that a portable Knowledge Base is not a bridge too far.

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Backlinks I believe can be baked in to the sorts of things I was suggesting. The graph is a bigger hurdle.

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Bless you for advancing that cause. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
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Thanks. I just wanted to check that this does not already exist.
Im about to write a Linkedin Post that PDF are not fit for purpose.

I wrote an earlier post on my experience with Obsidian and Linkedin.

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Here is the Linkedin Post Are PDFs are fit for purpose?

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And if we need AI to help us work out the meaning of a document.

Then - PDFs are clearly not fit for this purpose!

I don’t follow the logic here.