Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Down as of 2025, and because it was a dynamic mess Wayback Machine shows nothing.

They were first, but apparently fell down a bit as other cheaper and more open alternatives came up: www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/107ktxm/is_roam_research_over/

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.

Example:

Author's main social media account seems to be: mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling e.g. mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling/111359099228291730 His home page:

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: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: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 actually 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.

github.com/foambubble/foam impressive.

Open source Roam Research clone.

Markdown based, Visual Studio Code based.

Template project: github.com/foambubble/foam-template.

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

A CLI tool at: github.com/foambubble/foam-cli

Lot's of ECM ones!

Non-ECM:

This is the one. And the music is amazing: Section "Dream of the Red Chamber 1987 music".

The playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL64I_I1big7IIg5ugZzjpHGWSHHz0LrAF

The best ones:

Carnivores, ungulates, hedgehogs.

Mice, rabbits and primates.

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