by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 34)
TODO look into those more:
Major downsides that most of those personal knowledge databases have:
  • very little/no focus on public publishing, which is the primary focus of OurBigBook.com
  • either limited or no multiuser features, e.g. edit protection and cross user topics
  • graph based instead of tree based. For books we need a single clear ordering of a tree. Graph should come as a secondary thing through tags.
Closed source dump:
Markdown based, Visual Studio Code based.
Publishing possible but not mandatory focus, main focus is self notes. Publishing guide at: foambubble.github.io/foam/user/recipes/recipes.html#publish Related: jackiexiao.github.io/foam/reference/publishing-pages/.
They seem to use graphs more than trees which will complicate publication.
TODO are IDs might be correctly implemented and independent from source file location? Are there any examples? github.com/foambubble/foam/issues/512
Intro/docs: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-005P.xml. It is very hard to find information in that system however, largely because they don't seem to have a proper recursive cross file table of contents.
This is the project with the closest philosophy to OurBigBook that Ciro Santilli has ever found. It just tends to be even more idealistic than, OurBigBook in general, which is insane!
Source code: sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester. Not on GitHub, too much idealism for that.
"Docs" at: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-005P.xml Sample repo at: github.com/jonsterling/forest but all parts of interest are in submodules on the authors private Git server.
They have \Include like OurBigBook, nice: www.jonmsterling.com/jms-007L.xml, but OMG that name \transclude{xxx-NNNN}!! It seems to be possible to have human readable IDs too if you want: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-armaëlguéneau.xml is under trees/public/roladex/armaëlguéneau.tree.
Headers have open/close:
\subtree[jms-00YG]{}
OurBigBook considered this, but went with parent= instead finally to avoid huge lists of close parenthesis at the end of deep nodes.
One really cool thing is that the headers render internal links as clickable, which brings it all closer to the "knowledge base as a formal ontology" approach.
Does not encourage human readable IDs, uses stuff like jms-00YG.
The markup has relatively few insane constructs, notably you need explicit open paragraphs everywhere \p{}?! OMG, too idealistic, not enough pragmatism. There are however a few insane constructs:
  • [](): markdown like links
  • [[bluecat]]: wikilinks (but to raw IDs only, you can't seem to be able to do [[blue cat]]
  • #{} and ##{} for inline and block maths, though that might just be a sane construct with an insane name
The markup is documented at: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-007N.xml
Jon has some very good theory of personal knowledge base, rationalizing several points that Ciro Santilli had in his mind but hadn't fully put into words, which is quite cool.
OCaml dependency is not so bad, but it relies on actualy LaTeX for maths, which is bad. Maybe using JavaScript for OurBigBook wasn't such a bad choice after all, KaTeX just works.
Viewing the generated output HTML directly requires security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy which is sad, but using a local server solves it. So it appears to actually pull pieces together with JavaScript? Also output files have .xml extension, the idealism! They are reconsidering that though: www.jonmsterling.com/foreign-forester-jms-005P.xml#tree-8720.
The Ctrl+K article dropdown search navigation is quite cool.
\rel and \meta allows for arbitrary ontologies between nodes as semantic triples. But they suffer from one fatal flaw: the relations are headers in themselves. We often want to explain why a relation is true, give intuition to it, and refer to it from other nodes. This is obviously how the brain works: relations are nodes just like objects.
They do appear to be putting full trees on every toplevel regardless how deep and with JavaScript turned off e.g.:
which is cool but will take lots of storage. In OurBigBook Ciro Santilli only does that on OurBigBook Web where each page can be dynamically generated.
Good:
Crazy overlaps with Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook Project, Wikipedia states:
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Video 1.
New Game in Town by TheTedNelson (2016)
Source.
Closed source, no local editing? PDF annotation focus.
Seems like a "organize ideas for my private academic research" use case.
Co-founded by this dude: x.com/iamdrbenmiles
Sponsored by Obsidian itself!
Written in TypeScript!
Markdown support!
Everything is forcibly is scoped to files quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/wikilinks: 
[[Path to file#anchor|Anchor]]
Global table of contents based of in-disk file structure: quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/explorer with customizable sorting/filtering.
Interesting "gradual" WYSIWYG. You get inline previews for for things like images, maths and links. And if you click to edit the thing, the preview mostly goes away and becomes the corresponding source code instead.
Local only.
WYSIWYG:
  • bold
  • images
  • lists. But it is either hard or impossible to have a paragraph inside a list item.
Mathematics requires a plugin and a full LaTeX install: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Equation_Editor.html They have a bunch of plugins: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins.html
Can only link to toplevel of each source, not subheaders? And subpages get forced scope. github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki
Publishing to static HTML can be done with:
zim --export Notes -o out
The output does not contain any table of contents? There is a plugin however: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Table_Of_Contents.html
It is unclear if their markup is compatible with an existing language of if it was made up from scratch. Wikipedia says:
In Zim, text is written and saved in a lightweight mark-up that is a hybrid of DokuWiki and Markdown.
In the 2020's, this refers to writing down everything you know, usually in some graph structured way.
This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.
Ciro's still looking for the restore this plaintext backup on a new body though.
It is a good question, how much of your knowledge you would be able to give to others with text and images. It is likely almost all of it, except for coordination/signal processing tasks.
His passion for braindumping like this is a big motivation behind Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook.com work.
Cute synonym for second brain, sample usage: beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/#cntnt
zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ mentions one page to rule them all:
How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.

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