The state of backlinks

I’ve suggested something similar here and over at the zettelkasten.de forums. Semantic links could also greatly enhance the usefulness of backlinks:

In my opinion, the next further improvement would be to offer a formalized & standard way to encode the link relationship type with the link itself. Besides many other benefits, this would also allow software to provide a much better backlinks feature. E.g., if we could mark certain note links as “supporting” (or “opposing”) the thoughts in our current note, the software could group the autogenerated backlinks by link relationship type. That way, the software could visually separate links to “supporting” notes from “opposing” ones. IMO, such “qualified links” would be truly useful since they’d better preserve the knowledge aspect of a link.

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