YAML use cases

I have been more or less ignoring YAML in my notes (mostly zettelkasten-like) and am curious about what I am missing out on.

What are some valuable ways in which people are using YAML to great effect for personal knowledge management? Any recommendations for good guides to learn how to use YAML effectively for PKM?

I’m relatively new to Obsidian. The key I use in YAML most is Aliases, I find that to be very valuable, especially for pages about people or organizations. I’ve also taken to putting workout times in YAML, and then I have a page for workouts that shows each day I worked out, and the amount of time. I use the same key for a different ‘Habit’ chart that just shows a green checkmark if I worked out that day. I put the keys type (journal/people/recipe/ingredient/place/etc), created (creation date) and updated (last modified date) in the YAML on every page, anticipating I’ll find it useful at some point, but I’ve never actually used them yet.

I use YAML most often with Dataview for putting related types of notes in a table (e.g. meetings will have YAML properties for dates, the real meeting title from Outlook, the processing status, the meeting prep status). They are used by several other plug-ins too, like Obsidian Projects. I also have some “file type” properties (“meeting”, “project”, “web_article”), but I find that I use folder more for this purpose.

I used to add the creation timestamp, but Obsidian tracks that internally and the property can be easily accessed from Dataview. I track the number of Pomodoro sessions that I have in my daily note.