One of the greatly under-appreciated implications of the way Apple has designed Spotlight searching for application-specific items (such as emails, address book and calendar entries, etc.) is that they have introduced individual files which, when opened, link directly to the individual searchable items.
This opens the door for much better-integrated system-wide URLs. Just by playing some very simple tricks with file:/// URLs pointing to these special Spotlight dummy files corresponding to individual searchable items it’s quite straightforward to create URLs from anywhere to any individual item in Mail, Address Book, iCal, etc. (as well as any 3rd-party application that chooses to expose individual items to Spotlight).
It seems to me that DEVONthink is an ideal context in which to make use of this sort of linking. Why would I possibly want to import and fully duplicate all my Address Book entries in a lesser UI just so that I can link to them from DEVONthink notes if those same links could in fact jump to the original entries right in Address Book, itself. Of course, the database table functionality exposed by sheets is potentially powerful in its own right, but shouldn’t at least the URLs of imported Address Book entries, for example, be made to point to the Spotlight dummy files, enabling them to quickly open the original entries right inside Address Book?
There is, of course, similar power for linking Mail messages, etc. Automatic wiki linking could get a lot more powerful really quickly, if only it pointed to items in their original habbitat, rather than requiring users to import them all into the same lowest-common-denominator interface of DEVONthink (not that DT isn’t great at what it does, it’s just not as good at handling addresses as Address Book, etc.), making an unnecessarily separated copy of the original item.
And if DEVONthink exposes its individual notes and items to Spotlight in the same way (which I should hope it would in due time), the same power can be used in the other direction, enabling URLs anywhere else to point right to individual items in DEVONthink.
Taking the wiki-linking idea to its logical extreme, imagine if DEVONthink could also be made to use the Address Book database and various other applications’ Apple Event APIs to tag linked external items with backlinks to the given DEVONthink note (in the Address card’s Notes field, for example).
Wow.