4 items with this tag.
Building personal knowledge systems for research and learning
YAML is a human-readable format for storing structured data as plain text. In knowledge management and publishing workflows, it appears most commonly as the frontmatter block at the top of markdown files, where it holds metadata — title, author, date, tags — that tools can read without parsing the document itself.
A detailed account of a week-long project to restructure 5,819 Obsidian notes using AI as a working partner. The project involved building a 23-category taxonomy, migrating thousands of legacy notes to a consistent metadata structure, and generating AI-written descriptions for every note in the collection. The piece describes not just what was done, but how extended planning conversations, external project documentation, and careful human review at each phase made the work tractable. The most unexpected outcome was that building infrastructure for a note collection required articulating, for the first time, precisely how I think about my academic field.
Source details Matuschak, A., & Nielsen, M. (2019). How can we develop transformative tools for thought? numinous.productions/ttft .