I actually was just at a small meetup for people in the SF Bay Area who are building memex's. The Zettelkasten was a common theme in several of the projects people were working on. Here are my notes from the event for anyone interested: http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html
There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the Zettelkasten:
- IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole
- Roam Research by Conor White-Sullivan
- "Cards" by Joel Solymosi
IdeaFlow and Roam are both basically WorkFlowly except that you can link bullets together, plus additional unique features. The ability to link bullets together basically makes it a Zettelkasten, and enables many cool features. As Conor puts it "You shouldn’t have to know the structure of your thought as you’re typing".
Cards was more faithful to the Zettelkasten in that the metaphor was index cards instead of bullets. The unique thing about Joel's approach is that you can transclude them into documents (sequences of cards), which was a feature inspired by Project Xanadu. That enables Joel to reuse cards across many documents, and had the benefit of letting him effectively update multiple documents at once by editing a single card.
I've been writing an encyclopedia for the last six years. When I heard the Zettelkasten idea it made me wish I had heard of it earlier. It seems like a potentially better way to organize information since the links are between paragraphs rather than pages.
I guess because they do not have a common memex yet. :-)
But yes, RDF should fit very well.
As others pointed out already, I also dislike the idea of being locked into a proprietary file format. This should not be a problem using RDF - I guess we all should think about that idea.
RDF is the technology behind schema.org, so that would be a good success story. There are quite a bunch of companies working around RDF based technologies, like TopQuadrant, StarDog, Ontotext, and more. But if you want to start playing with it, I recommend you start with Jena/Fuseki [1], it is super easy to run.
Example: say your database contains a note about "doves", and another one about, say, "seagulls". Later, you can search for things you have written about birds, and the query would find both your notes about doves and seagulls (something that you wouldn't be able to do with a fulltext search). There's a whole world of things you can do with inference, so using RDF is a no brainer when it comes to finding relationships between things. It also makes it trivial to import knowledge annotated by other ppl.
If you are interested, here are some other resources I found useful to get started:
This is book is old but Chapter 2 and 3 are a good intro on "machine-readable meaning" and Inference. The author also has another cool book on "collective intelligence" I still haven't worked through yet :-)
Pure chance. A mutual friend knew about my project and invited me to the first meetup, which happened a couple months ago.
We were hoping this second one would allow us to do deeper critques than the first, which was paced more quickly, but somehow none of us got more than 20 minutes to talk about our projects (which is why my notes are so short).
There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the Zettelkasten:
- IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole - Roam Research by Conor White-Sullivan - "Cards" by Joel Solymosi
IdeaFlow and Roam are both basically WorkFlowly except that you can link bullets together, plus additional unique features. The ability to link bullets together basically makes it a Zettelkasten, and enables many cool features. As Conor puts it "You shouldn’t have to know the structure of your thought as you’re typing".
Cards was more faithful to the Zettelkasten in that the metaphor was index cards instead of bullets. The unique thing about Joel's approach is that you can transclude them into documents (sequences of cards), which was a feature inspired by Project Xanadu. That enables Joel to reuse cards across many documents, and had the benefit of letting him effectively update multiple documents at once by editing a single card.
I've been writing an encyclopedia for the last six years. When I heard the Zettelkasten idea it made me wish I had heard of it earlier. It seems like a potentially better way to organize information since the links are between paragraphs rather than pages.