Tagging and filtering in canvas view, right tool for the job?

I manage several tech-related service points for a university library. Each service point needs improvement and I have a large number of project ideas and task ideas that I want to capture, organize on a visual canvas, and then filter the items that are visible on the canvas based on tags. Do you think Obsidian is a good tool for this exercise? I also use Smartsheet and Miro for my work, but Smartsheet lacks visualization tools and Miro lacks tagging. Thank you for the advice!

I’ve never quite gotten the fascination with canvases, that’s on me, but I’ve handled various similar use cases related to larger project ideas and some visual tool to guide me organising those ideas. My go to, is the KanBan plugin, and its board view.

I’d use various swim lanes (or lists) for different categories, and one card for each idea or action. Then I simply drag them around to organise them as I see fit. If needed the card only has a one line description, or it could have a connected note (which I set up to be in a dedicated folder for each KanBan board) where I could elaborate on the idea, or note questions, and so on.

This do give me a rather good overview and ease of mind related to organising them. If you want, you could proceed doing queries against these boards as each card is stored as list/task items under headings (which corresponds to the lists/swim lanes). One board is one markdown file with headings and list/task items (and a little extra meta information).


So my question would be that, yes, Obsidian could be a good tool for such an idea, and there are more than one way to do it. You don’t necessarily need to use a canvas, which I imagine quickly can be very unruly and large .

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I don’t see anything about filtering in the Canvas docs. There might be a community plugin for that (I haven’t heard of one).

The Graph can be filtered, but not intentionally arranged. The Persistent Graph community plugin might enable that.