today I went back to an idea that sat lurking in the back of my mind for some weeks ..
i heard about @semble.so from Benjamin Braun on bluesky - and thought it would be nice to collaboratively gather collections of sources (journal articles, blog posts, books, whatever ...) and maybe a possibility to circumvent the paid zotero subscription needed to sync larger amounts of data, e.g. pdfs between devices.
as of now my dream pipeline connecting local zotero libraries, shared collections and a collaborative markdown-based wiki (in obsidian syntax) looks like this:
Library:
the library is basically just a list of sources with metadata, just as your Zotero library. It should also include the attached pdf and notes (txt, md).
- in semble.so this unit/item corresponds to the card
Connections:
this is exciting about semble.so : items/cards can have a typed connection between them, e.g. X "supports", "explains", "contradicts", "leads to", ... Y. It would be really cool to have the connection types color-coded in the graph view. Would it also be possible to integrate these types as an option for the wiki links?
Collections
are just sets of library items. semble.so seems to make it easy to create collections collaboratively, and/or give other users (reading/writing) access to them. Semble.so already has a plugin to sync with zotero collections. There should be private, group (invitation-based), and public (anyone can read/write) access tiers for collections. What still seems to be missing in semble.so are (infinitely recursive) sub-collections, i.e. collections of collections of collections of ... you get the idea. (Also process-wise this seems to be the place to collect my tabs opened from marxists-reading-ft-bluesky or polycrisis-discord that currently remain open in vivaldi indefinitely - do research while i'm scrolling social media)
Wiki
- collaboratively work on ("encyclopedia") articles
- cited sources are attached/mentioned in the article md file via their library identifier ("link") - just like the zotero intergration plugin for obsidian.
- think a collaborative obsidian - would be great to upload/download/sync selected files between your local obsidian vault and the shared library - so same link syntax, and also include images as in the obsidian user interface.
- articles should have "topical" collections, containing library items that are connected to its topic but not yet cited in it.
- discussions/forum area for each article (or topic area)
- basically it should be a collaborative obsidian + forum + souces linking to library items.
Graph view
- UI that makes it easy to select which items and wiki articles should be included in the graph
- color-code for the connection types
perplexity.ai -style search engine /Retrieval-augmented-Generation on top of this all? :)