Org-Roam

Published on 19/01/2023

Org roam is a Emacs mode for organizing notes from Org-mode. It is based on the slip box principle developed by Niklas Luhmann described in Communicating with Slip Boxes.

Using Org-roam for research

There are some talks about how to use org-roam in research organization:

Org-mode and Org-Roam for Scholars and Researchers gives a complete workflow using several packages.

HTML export

The simplest way to export a org-roam library is to use the default org-mode publish engine, but there is no support for the backlinks, which the main interest of org-roam over org-mode in term of provided information.

In this issue, they tackle the problem of backlinks export, but still remains the problems of updating the backlinks when and only when it is needed, which seems to be solved by this other issue.

The database structure

The list of the tables is:

.tables

A sample of the table files:

select * from nodes limit 10;

A sample of the table links, which contains several types "https", "http", "file"

select * from links limit 5;

A sample of the table refs, which contains only one type "website"

select * from refs limit 5;

A sample of the empty table tags

select * from tags limit 5;

A sample of the table titles

select * from titles limit 5;

Building a RDF graph from Org roam database

I would to represent the knowledge stored in the roam database as an RDF graph.

I currently have built some mappings for it using Obi-Wan.

Org roam ontology

Some links are stored in links table, which contains different types of links from a org file to diverse resources:

select distinct type from links;

In my example, there are links, which point to website, to others file (not necessarily org files and not necessarily under org-roam), to cite (for example introduced using org-ref), to fuzzy selection of a file content or to mu4e mail. I proposed to use the property https://schema.org/mentions for representing it.

There are also references (stored in refs tables), which contains the #+ROAM_KEY values. It can be considered that the org file is a note on the resource represented by the values. It can be represented by https://schema.org/mainEntity

And finally the title of each org file is stored in table titles