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Notes and Prepositions

In language, a preposition is a fundamental part of speech for a common word or group of words that establishes a relationship between people, places, or things and other elements in a sentence.

They are used before a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to indicate direction (navigation or movement), time, place (location), spatial relationship, or to introduce an object.

These are some common prepositions:

  • Place (where): in, on, at, by, near, between, behind, above, below, beside. For example, in Ideaverse Pro, the `in` property is used to describe the relationship between a collection of similar notes with the same attribute value; related views provide queries to display tables of matching notes such as Movies or Books.
  • Direction (navigation or movement): up, from, to, into, toward, through, along, across, onto, off, over. As an example, in Ideaverse Pro, the `up` property in most notes identifies the most relevant note, topic, or map "upward" toward the home note.
  • Time (when): before, during, after, from, to, until, since, throughout, within, between, under, over, for. For example, diabetes health logs might have lists that include metadata fields for `glucose` values recorded `before` and `after` the `carbs` for a meal.
  • Other: as, like, on, of, with, about, against, around, but (except).

Relationship metadata

Prepositions can be used within text paragraphs to provide relationship context for links to associated notes. However, this is only helpful to describe what the link represents when reading a note, but these text words can't be used like metadata properties, fields, or tags in Dataview queries for relationship links between notes, such as properties such as up, related, or in.

Sometimes it's useful to have a relationship note to provide additional context and/or metadata associated with related notes.

Since an Obsidian internal link only links two Markdown files together as a connected relationship, sometimes it might be helpful to use a link note for more explicitly defined connections between notes.

Often this can be accomplished by a map note, but some situations might need to insert an intermediate link note between a source and target note.

For example, its content could provide additional context and/or structure, and its metadata could add specific properties associated with the relationship.

In a Neo4j graph database, you can define attributes for either nodes (objects, or "notes") or relationships (connections or "links"). Since Obsidian links are simply associations between related files, any additional "relationship" semantics and metadata needs to be expressed using headings, textual context, or link notes.

Transition bridge notes

In other cases, you might have transition notes that bridge concepts or ideas, where it might be useful to include a link note. This might be similar to join tables in a relational database that represent many-many relationships between two other tables using foreign keys.

I like to create link notes where I paste lists of web links that I paste from an Arc Browser tab folder. These are created from web exploration on a spark, topic, effort, project, area, or interest where I manually collect and cluster links or automatically organize them using its Tidy Tabs AI feature.