Feature request for standalone notes

dbot
I have a need to indicate if a linked reference is for or against the content in a standalone note. I.e I would like to be able to assign one or more tags to the links I attach to a standlone note.
  • jimdelaney
    I agree - annotating links would be a great addition.
  • dstillman
    I'm not clear on what the request is here. Could you rephrase?
  • bdarcus
    I presume they're referring to being able to define more specific "related" items.

    I'd prefer including a wider array of standard relations, than using something completely wide-open, uncontrolled, unlocalized, etc. like tagging.
  • jimdelaney
    What I would like to see is some way to annotate the relation between two items. This could be through a tag or some other means. This would allow me to note not just that two items *are* related, but also *how* they are related. A free-form note could be more useful than a series of standard relations. Not sure how you would do this through the UI. Tinderbox does this pretty elegantly on the Mac, but has a much more flexible interface.
  • dstillman
    OK, thanks. More descriptive relations are planned, but I'm not sure if we'll do a set of standard relations, as Bruce suggests, or a more flexible system. Each has its advantages and disadvantages...
  • bdarcus
    Dan, I'm usually thinking at the data level. RDF is perfectly suited for expressing these kinds of relations; e.g.:


    <http://zotero.org/doe/notes/1> z:cites <http://ex.net/1> .

    <http://zotero.org/doe/notes/1> z:challenges <http://ex.net/1> .

    <http://zotero.org/doe/notes/1> z:questions <http://ex.net/1> .


    ... whatever. You can define those relations in machine-processable ways, add localizations, mash up the data, graph it, etc. etc.

    If you try to just use natural language tags for the relations, you lose that. It's not at all elegant to do that in RDF (or a relational database in my view).

    But this goes back to bigger yet-to-be-resoived issues, like discussions of custom fields and types, which frankly scares the hell out of me.
  • dstillman
    Agreed (on all parts, including the final sentiment). Perhaps dbot, jmdelane, and others can comment on the sort of relations they'd want to use, and the ways in which a standard set of relations would be limiting? At the very least, we need to start building up a comprehensive list of possible relations.
  • bdarcus
    At the very least, we need to start building up a comprehensive list of possible relations.
    +1

    I'd vote for a wiki page for people to list these. No doubt some of the likely options are already covered somewhere.
  • dstillman
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1317/semantic-relations/
  • dbot
    Sorry for not replying sooner.
    I'm using standalone notes for entering observations and ideas. I then link to related references. It would be very useful to be able to describe the relationship of each related link to the the note. Currently my main interest is to indicate if a reference supports the observation or idea. The descriptions used need not be anymore verbose than a tag.
    Does this help?
  • bdarcus
    I'm using standalone notes for entering observations and ideas. I then link to related references. It would be very useful to be able to describe the relationship of each related link to the the note. Currently my main interest is to indicate if a reference supports the observation or idea. The descriptions used need not be anymore verbose than a tag.
    Does this help?
    Yes, but you're presuming a particular implementation (tags). What I think you mean to say is you want to describe the nature of the relation, rather than to just use the hopelessly vague "related" link. Right?

    What Dan and I are recognizing is that while tagging has the advantage of flexibility, it has the major disadvantage of it essentially being user-and-or-language-specific.

    If we can instead define a fixed (but extensible) list of types of relations, we can have semantics that scale across different users and even languages, such that the data can be merged, analyzed, etc., etc.

    So imagine something like:


    cites
    refutes
    supports
    ...


    ... and so forth.

    Come to think of it, it seems likely to me the relations between items would be different than relations between notes and items.

    BTW, just reminds me; see Annozilla. If you look at the screenshot, it allows the user to specify type of annotation (comment, question, etc.). In this case, they're typing the annotation rather than the relation link.

    I guess annotations are a little different than notes, but I'm finding myself struggling to articulate how!
  • dbot
    Your idea is more practical but how difficult is it to implement?
  • dstillman
    Your idea is more practical but how difficult is it to implement?
    Not much more difficult than using tags—either way it's a predefined set of descriptors. (Tags just happen to be defined by the user.)

    The hardest part would be coming up with a list of standard relations that could satisfy the majority of uses.

    Now, tying these relations into the data model and adding support for custom relations, both of which I discuss on that other thread...that's another matter. But those could happen later.
  • dbot
    I think you would need to allow users to define the title/description for each standard relation
    (I have to go off line...)
  • dbot
    Wether it is relationships, tags or custom fields, is the problem any different from dealing with xml? Only predefined elements can be universally understood yet it is still possible to have custom elements or attributes which allows identification and classification.
    Apart from that, custom tags, relationships and fields will always be a requirement as one would never be able to cover everything.
  • dbot
    Anyway, to recap - I would like to be able to store my ideas/observations in Zotero. To do this I assume I would use standalone notes. I would then like to link in references which I have obtained from pubmed. I can do this via the 'related' button/interface for the note. What is missing is a way to define the relationship of each link - in my case this would be "my observation is refuted/supported by the associated reference".
    If done properly, I could then also use the resulting hierarchy in applications like freemind.
    It sounds like such features are planned for a future version of Zotero, if that is correct can I help?
  • jimdelaney
    I guess that there are upsides and downsides to any approach. I do like the idea of a series of standard relationships; it would be fast, and I expect would make sharing and browsing collections easier. But I can't help but think that sometimes, when describing a relationship, I may want to do something more freeform: "Isn't it interesting that X thinks that Y is wrong, even though sh/e has said Z." The downside of this approach is that it would make browsing links difficult (look at all notes that refute the thesis Y's article).

    Jim
  • hmarcuse
    I thought I posted a feature request for exactly this (standalone notes--I don't quite follow all this relational linking stuff) a few weeks ago, but I've been browsing threads and can't find it now. Anyway, I am old enough to have used 3x5 cards extensively, also Hypercard (and Procite and endnote). What Zotero does is create what I'd call bibliography cards, with notes and keywords (tags) associated with that book.
    But I would also like to have keyword cards that are NOT associated with a book. For instance, I'm doing research on memorial sites. I have my own observations and photos of many sites and want to create a Zotero record for those. I will never cite those records, but I want to have that information integrated into my Zotero database (and through "Tags" or "Related" link them to specific books with notes I've taken on that site.
    What I do now is create a "book" record and put my keyword (or city name) in the Title field, and a term like "definition" or "notes" (or site within that city) in for Creator (so I can see what it is in the middle pane). Sometimes I cut from the notes I've taken from various books and paste into a note associated with my own custom "book" entry, so that I can generate and print a report with all of the notes together in one handy location and work off the hard copy.
    But using this workaround--using the "book" record this way--seems awkward. Not only do I have "series" and "volume" and all of these irrelevant fields to skip past (I often use the Year or Date field, too), but I've shown Zotero to several of my colleagues, and it seems to give them another reason not to want to try Zotero.
    All I would need is a way of creating a "custom" record type--then I'd rename "Title" to be "Keyword" (or "term," or "site" or whatever--to be filled in with the term that I'm collecting definitions of, or the city the memorial is in), and "Author" could be renamed, for example, "sublocation" and be filled in with that city that has a memorial.
    There are ways to do this with tags, but they are not intuitive (at least not to me), and they are non-hierarchical. I like to put all my locations into a collection and sort on the name of the city (ie. the title column), or pull all records about a specific memorial in that city together (sort on the creator column).
    But maybe once I've renamed those fields they wouldn't show up in those columns in the middle pane? I guess I'm better off sticking with my workaround then. Oh well. Still, it would be nice to be able to get rid of all of the fields in the "Book" record that are irrelevant to my particular type of "card" (record). Just three or four fields that show up in the central pane would be sufficient for my purposes.
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