Possible future of Zotero as a personal knowledge base.
Except for the reference management functions, the notes in Zotero is very powerful now. You can add citations to the notes, and cite the notes itself, group and tag the notes. So, Zotero is capable of being used as OneNote, Notion and so on. However, the potential of Zotero as a notebook software is still hidden behind the reference management.
I think make the notebook function more prominent and independent can help a lot. It would be a possible future direction for the development of Zotero.
And Zotero would have the functions of a personal knowledge base:
1. notes and notebooks (including citation functions, figure, structure)
2. reference management (library, citation, snapshots, and view of PDF and other format),
3. knowledge sharing (online shared library, single note or notebook sharing)
4. knowledge storage (both local and cloud storage of notebooks, reference libraries and so on).
I think make the notebook function more prominent and independent can help a lot. It would be a possible future direction for the development of Zotero.
And Zotero would have the functions of a personal knowledge base:
1. notes and notebooks (including citation functions, figure, structure)
2. reference management (library, citation, snapshots, and view of PDF and other format),
3. knowledge sharing (online shared library, single note or notebook sharing)
4. knowledge storage (both local and cloud storage of notebooks, reference libraries and so on).
100% agree. I think Zotero has already solved the hardest problem in building a personal knowledge management tool: the capture and representation of citation information. None of the other personal knowledge management tools (and I've tried OneNote, Evernote, SimpleNote, Obsidian, Joplin, Notion, Logseq, Google Keep) do this well, if at all. What most of them do: noting, notebooking, tagging, in-linking. That stuff is relatively easy. And Zotero is already 90% of the way there.
Of the group of personal knowledge management tools, my favorite is Obsidian. It has a few killer features:
- markdown-based notes
- ability to add custom fields via YAML-headers
- ability to query your entire vault on-the-fly using SQL-style queries (with the Dataview plugin)
If Zotero had these features, that'd be game over for me. I would buy an extra monitor just to keep a Zotero window open all day.
I don't mean to trivialize the work it would take to get Zotero to this point. It would be very hard. It's just that Zotero is closer to this point than any of these other tools. Yet, I rarely see Zotero mentioned as a straight-up competitor with these tools.
(1) make it possible to include notes, highlights, etc., in collections (which is powerful in Citavi); and (2) make it possible to insert these knowledge items verbatim into a document (together with the source), just as you can do now with references. Doesn't seem very hard (caveat: not a programmer!), and I think this would please a lot of users!