My thought is to use separate notes for each. Then link to the parent in a dedicated field of the frontmatter (which will be nicely formatted as a link if you’re on 1.4). In each location that might have sub-locations, use a dataview query to list all of its immediate children. There might even be a way with dataviewjs to list all of the people in a given region by traversing the “tree” of successive links.
This is definitely one of those questions that’s hard to give a definitive answer to. It really depends on what you’re using the YAML for and whether not having it on all relevant notes would prevent you from accomplishing your goal.
Let’s say I have my watched movies in Obsidian. I have basic YAML like IMDB link, genre, and year released. Later, I decide I want to see what directors I have watched the most. In this instance, not having the director YAML on all of my movies is something I would want to fix.
Continuing the above example, I would do two things to make adapting the new structure easier. First, I would update my template for movies to automatically include that field for any new movies I create. Second, I would probably use Dataview to create a utility page to identify movies with no director. The logic of the query would basically be “select all from movies where no director”. That way I could systematically update my existing notes without having to look through all of them individually.
Hopefully this gives you a couple of ideas. If you have any follow-up questions, let me know!
Thank you! This is pretty much how I go about it, but the manual work load is still great.
In my case it is the adoption of LATCH, a concept I only encountered after I had already been using Obsidian for some time. Not to mention that my LATCH template already changed once or twice, until I found what works for me, but this still leaves the possibility open for future changes to it and another round of mass edits. Deciding on a more fundamental level, if and how or if at all I should address these changes is a question that I have not yet found a decisive answer to.
Why would you want to restructure your noted just to add more meta data?
I just leave it as it is. But my notes are categories in their own vaults so there is never a need to Refactor previous notes to a new form as they don’t interact with each other anyway.
Well it’s not just meta data. I write only the bare necessities in an actual YAML header, the rest of the front matter goes into a comment section below that. This gives me the option to add links as meta data. What I would like to do is to embed older notes with LATCH. This would help with cataloging and indexing, which would in turn help with identifying merge-able topics, relating topics and reviewing notes.
I’ve gone through a similar conclusion myself. I used to use daily notes, dataview, and all sorts of Obsidian plugins to manage my tasks.
I find that I generally like to keep my vault to primarily be a “long term storage” tool. I want to use search to find curated info, not littered with to-do notes that don’t add value past it’s due date.
I’ve since migrated my To-Do activities to TickTick, and moved my daily notes to a secondary vault.
I could probably do this with Dataview, but I would prefer proper wikilinks.
I don’t really understand what you mean by that. Do you mean, that you want to link to the note? Because Dataview can definitely do that. Or are you refering to linking to the headers within a note? I don’t think that this can be done with Dataview.
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