Some real-world cases:
TL;DR
In a nutshell, the real-world application for me seems to be that the graph provides an additional way of viewing connections that is easier for people like me who prefer a visual representation of the connections. But it’s also nice to have those list views as well, you wouldn’t want to just have the graph as it could get too congested.
1. Daily Notes
In my Daily Notes I use both Item Links and Tags to links documents together. I have some routines where every day I connect documents to my central Daily Note, such as all emails for that day, specific photos or documents. For these I use Item Links. When referring to certain topics in my note, I use tags. Yes all of these connections * can be seen in the Links Inspector or the Tag Inspector, but having the Graph view provides a nice visual map of the connections. My brain processes the map easier than lists.
- except the Custom Metadata outgoing links where there is currently a bug. See DT4 - Links inspector not showing Custom Metadata outgoing links, but the new Graph view does
2. Showing the link between related documents.
I often like to link various PDFs to PDFs or to Markdown Files and other file types. I do this when they are related, which could be one document supports the other, or they relate to a certain project. The graph view shows these relationships when you might otherwise have forgotten the link exists.
I love that the graph view shows all link types - Item Links, Custom Metadata links, Tags and Wikilinks (which I don’t use but I know others do). That provides so much flexibility to support the different ways we all work and connect our information.
EDIT: I forgot “Mentions”. I don’t quite understand that yet, but look forward to exploring what it means.
3. Aiding research
The See Also is going to useful for research as it will make suggestions based on DEVONthink AI on possible links to explore.
I am looking forward to continuing to explore how else it will assist my personal and professional work.