Obsidian Plugin for Building a Digital Zettelkasten or Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) System

Hello Obsidian Community,

I would like to propose the development of a plugin that will enhance our note-taking and knowledge management experience within Obsidian. This plugin aims to leverage AI and other advanced features to build a sophisticated Digital Zettelkasten or Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. Here are the key features I envision:

  1. Leverage AI to Analyze Memo Content:
  • Utilize artificial intelligence to analyze the content of your memos and notes. The AI will understand the context and meaning of each note, providing deeper insights and more accurate categorizations.
  1. Create Categories and Categorize Notes:
  • Develop a personalized decimal taxonomy system that dynamically evolves. The plugin will automatically categorize notes using this system, consolidating or refining categories as the volume of notes increases. This ensures an organized and scalable categorization system tailored to the user’s unique needs.
  1. Create and Tag Titles Representing Memo Content:
  • Automatically generate titles that accurately represent the content of each memo. These titles will make it easier to identify and retrieve specific notes.
  1. Merge Frequently Occurring Tags:
  • As the number of notes grows, the plugin will merge frequently occurring tags into similar or comprehensive tags. This helps maintain a clean and efficient tagging system, reducing redundancy and improving searchability.
  1. Assign IDs Based on Categorized Categories:
  • Each note will be assigned a unique ID based on its category. This structured approach to ID assignment will make it easier to track and manage notes systematically.
  1. Combine IDs and Titles to Create Filenames:
  • Generate filenames by combining the unique IDs with the note titles. This method will produce descriptive and easily identifiable filenames, facilitating better organization and retrieval.
  1. Automatically Identify Connections Between Notes:
  • The plugin will automatically identify and create links between related notes. This feature will help build a robust network of interconnected notes, enhancing the overall value of your knowledge base.

Detailed Workflow with Examples

  1. AI Analysis:
  • Upon creation or modification of a note, the AI will analyze its content, identifying key themes, concepts, and context.
  1. Dynamic Categorization with Personalized Decimal Taxonomy:
  • The plugin will assign the note to an appropriate category within the personalized decimal taxonomy. For example:
    • Category 100: Philosophy
      • Category 110: Epistemology
        • Category 111: Theories of Knowledge
    • A new note about “The Role of Perception in Knowledge Acquisition” might be categorized under 111.2 if the taxonomy dynamically evolves to incorporate more specific subcategories as the number of notes increases.
  1. Title Generation and Tagging:
  • Based on the AI’s analysis, a relevant title and appropriate tags will be generated for the note. For example, the note “The Role of Perception in Knowledge Acquisition” might be tagged with #perception, #knowledge, #epistemology. Similar tags like #theoryofknowledge and #knowledgeacquisition might be merged into #epistemology.
  1. ID Assignment and Filename Creation:
  • A unique ID will be assigned based on the note’s category. For example, the note categorized under 111.2 might be assigned an ID like 111.2-001. The filename would then be created by combining this ID with the generated title, resulting in a filename like 111.2-001_The_Role_of_Perception_in_Knowledge_Acquisition.md.
  1. Link Creation:
  • The plugin will identify related notes and automatically create links. For example, if there is another note titled “The Influence of Perception on Empirical Knowledge”, the plugin will create a link between these two notes, facilitating easy navigation and discovery of related content.

By integrating these features, this plugin will significantly enhance the way we manage and utilize our notes in Obsidian, making it an indispensable tool for anyone looking to build a comprehensive digital Zettelkasten or PKM system.

I look forward to your feedback and hope to see this plugin become a reality soon!

1 Like

Just want to revive this with a helpful resource that could help with implementation:

Similar features are detailed in GitHub - fynnfluegge/rocketnotes: LLM-powered Markdown editor (MIT License) with said features implemented as python lambda handlers. These would need to be ported to Typescript which may not be trivial given the usage of some python libraries in the source.

I’m just discovering Obsidian notes and will keep an eye out for semantic search and categorization features.

I’d also suggest features to review AI generated content, like tagging all such content, so it can be checked for errors.

Hi,
I think the Create Categories and Categorize Notes feature goes against the principles of Zettelkasten, which eschews categorization. For the rationale, please see section 2, “Luhmann’s Card Index System”, of “The Issue of the Constitution in Luhmann’s Card Index System. Reading the Traces” [1].

I also consider the feature Title Generation and Tagging to be debatable because an important part of making notes is creating the title and assigning tags. We don’t want to delegate the part that makes us think, understand, and grow. Also, the title and tags don’t necessarily follow from the content, but rather from the interpretation thereof - there will be times when we will make a note because we spotted a gap or a flaw in a reference, and the title points out what the issue is.

[1] https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/download/2942476/2942532/jschmidt_2016_the%20issue%20of%20the%20constitution.pdf

Have you ever tried this ?

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/privacy-first-self-hosting-file-organizer-2000-for-a-self-organizing-vault/80275

This may be true, but Obsidian is not exclusively a Zettelkasten app. The beauty of the plugin environment is that people can make Obsidian work in the way they want or need it rather than adhering to opinionated systems.