Obsidian for Ontologies

Planted February 1, 2025

RIP Niklas Luhmann you would have loved RDF.

I’m thinking a lot about ontologies lately. When I “learned to code”, HTML was up first, and thanks to my Wikipedia surfing habit I learned about Tim Berners Lee and his vision for the semantic web pretty early on. I didn’t fully understand it then, and I still don’t now, but I keep coming back to this cloud of related topics because it feels interesting and useful.

I’m probably going to get some things wrong here – that’s why this is “learning out loud” and not “authoritative knowledge on a topic” – you’re in my digital garden and you’re henceforth subject to my work in progress.

Here’s my question of the day:

What would an “Obsidian” for Ontologies look like?

If you don’t know, Obsidian is a personal knowledge management program built for note-taking in Markdown. It’s not open source, but it is free for personal use, and it’s quite popular in my corner of the internet. (Let’s be real, if you’re still here and paying attention – it’s our corner of the internet. You know what Obsidian is)

I loved Obsidian for bidirectional linking – it made a lot of sense to me to connect topics between my notes, and to surf them as I liked, to visualize my connections.

Markdown is easy to write in, and it was a breath of fresh air to see that my notes were plain-text files living locally on my device. It was an easy program to learn and start using, and to apply to my life.

That’s not a thing for ontologies. I’ve tried to find a program that I can pick up quickly, tinker with, and explore ideas in. Protégé was the obvious first choice to try – and it was fine. I followed Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology, which is a great introduction to this topic from an academic perspective.

It isn’t quite what I’m looking for, though. It is obviously a straightforward and useful tool - one that I am sure I will turn to when I have a proper use case. But it’s not helping me learn in the experimental and experiential methods I’m used to, and it doesn’t fit in my stack of PKM tools.

I found Onto4All in my search as well, and that was a nice experience – the draw.io of ontologies. But still not what I’m thinking of.

I might be dreaming too big when I think about whether it’s possible to lower the barrier of entry into this kind of technology. It’s hard. It’s complex. Where are they even teaching this stuff? Who are you wizards that understand? What are your backgrounds like?

Are any of you not specialists?

I can wrap my head around ontologies for heavy enterprise purposes, scientific research, semantic networks, AI systems. I can’t wrap my head around ontologies for Me and my knowledge work. In my current note-taking systems, I can create links for my associations between subjects, but it isn’t a structured representation of my knowledge and domain. I think it would be very useful if I could begin learning and using ontologies at my level, and not have to animorph into a statistician, philosopher, and PhD candidate to get started.

A follow up question:

Is it possible to create a tool that introduces ontological thinking in a way that feels as natural as note-taking?