i love the inherent graph/network approach that Supernotes takes, and i’m a bit of a newbie, so this might not be the best characterization for this question, nor even the best way to frame this.
I understand how every note is a ‘node’ in our personal knowledge graph, and that we can connect notes/nodes via the concept of “Parent Card” or “internal reference links”. But is there a way to create “types of edges”? For example, let’s say we have an edge/link of type “healthcare” which sits inside our note called “budget” (“Parent/Root Node”): would it be possible to list all edges of type “healthcare”? This way, using this example, we’d be able to have a list of different types of edges that we can use: following this example, from our Parent Card “Budget” we can have edges that are of ‘healthcare’ type, that are of ‘mechanic’ type, of ‘utilities’ type, etc? (This would be instead of creating those as Cards/Notes and connecting them with the same “Budget” Parent Card, so we can eventually re-use such “edge/link types” in other scenarios.)
In slightly more cumbersome terminology, is there a notion of ‘hypergraph’ in Supernotes?
thanks in advance for any help, and i apologize if this is the wrong place to post this question…
Hi @danieldf, thanks for the interesting question.
The short answer is: no, Supernotes does not have “hypergraph” functionality which allows you to add additional dimensionality to your existing graph structure.
However, what we do have is orthogonal organizational concepts that you can use in tandem to achieve similar goals. As you’ve noted that means both a hierarchal parent/child relationship structure but also just a wiki-style hyperlink structure. One thing you didn’t mention though is the tagging system, which I think is probably closest to what you’re looking for here. If you just tag cards with certain properties, you can generally filter as you want with enough detail.
If tags aren’t sufficient, could you go into a bit more detail as to why you think a hypergraph might be uniquely suitable for a certain use case?
hi @connor : thank you very much for the prompt and thoughtful reply — really appreciated. secondly, apologies for the delay in following up (i got trapped in one of those “life black holes” that appear from time to time). thirdly, i’ve been thinking of an example/use case since i read your answer… and i’m afraid i haven’t come up with anything particularly ‘inspiring’ (for lack of a better term)…
and you’re absolutely on-point: tags is how i’ve been building this similar functionality. so, i typically tag notes with all sorts of relevant characteristics so that i can [potentially] perform more sophisticated searches if/when needed.
unfortunately, the examples i’ve got in mind are more “theoretical” in nature: (A) i’d like to be able to organize my notes in a “Venn diagram”-type style (which is essentially a hypergraph) and that would require the ability to create ‘relationships’ among objects so that i could pick and choose objects and relationships; (B) [this is almost an argument against myself!] the notion of a line-graph (when you “flip vertices and edges”, ie, you build the adjacencies between edges) is a way of thinking that’s super helpful (maybe to me only, though) particularly when searching/organizing notes; and finally (C) if i understand correctly, this is the main differential that Tana Inc, https://tana.inc , offers, which is annoying because IMHO you guys do a much better job on everything else.
thank you again for your answer, i really appreciate it… and apologies for not knowing how much trouble, technically speaking, this question can potentially imply…