Relations in Devonthink

DEVONthink Feedback
1

Hello all,
this is my first post to this forum. I had my copy of Devonthink for quite a while on my hard disk but I never engaged seriously until the last week.
When I first looked somewhat deeper into the manual I was surprised that Devonthink lackes several features which I took for granted, especially as the program is praised and as far as I know also heavily used for academic purposes. When it comes to research it is certainly important to store data in a secure place without getting trapped into some esoteric and/or proprietary file format and I really appreciate the developers determination not to turn Devonthink into some island application where data and workflow get isolated. But when it comes to computer aided research it is equally important

(A)
(i) to create relations between documents.
(ii) to annotate documents and relations.
(iii) to annotate the items of type (ii).
(B) to have the possibility to repeat (A) ad libitum
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to have the possibility to make the (A)-nexus visual in a meaningful way. I don’t want to engage in the right brain babble but I think tools e.g. graphviz could be used to create a clickable and zoomable topography of the nexus established by the researcher.
(D)
to have some reliable citation management that is working both for natural sciences and humanities.

There is software that implement (A) to © to a certain extend, e.g. Wiki solutions, Tinderbox etc. (For (D) I use Latex). However these relationship-centered solutions tend to force the reseacher into formats that do not correspond to the format of the original documents. So instead of working with documents you will be obliged to stick with the format offered by the application. Thus it is not certain that the researcher will be able to use or interact with her data from outside the application, not to mention data security. On the other side applications like devonthink are document-centered and I deeply appreciate this approach but I’am still in dire need of some »wiki layer« above my database that makes (A) to (D) somehow possible. Is there, apart from the AI features, any Intention to develop Devonthink into a more a relationship-centered application?

I’am completely new to applescript but I think the URL-solution of the annotation template is only a temporary and one dimensional solution for linking items together. My equally temporary and embryonic solution to get the annotation stuff done is to create annotations »a_i« linked to a document »d« by creating bookmarks with the same name as »d« (so they will appear beneath »d«) and in the same group as d that are linking to the »a_i«s. Latter on when the relationships are more established I drag the bookmarks in a »bridge« rtf-file where they appear as links.
Best wishes,
Dilano

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DEVONthink supports both automatic Wiki linking (either using MashedWords or names plus the aliases, see Info panel) in plain/rich text documents and user-defined cross-links. Cross-links can be defined in rich texts via the “(Insert) Link To” submenu of the contextual menu or via Cmd-Opt-drag & drop of another document into the text.

Cross-links can be also copied via Edit > Copy Item Link and pasted into many other applications/documents or into link annotations of PDF documents for example.

3

Let »≥" some transitive relation and

p: some PDF-document
p - a: p states fact a
p - a – b ≥ a: “p states fact a” is linked to some note where “b ≥ a” is stated

and suppose the following situation

a ≥ b – a - p & p - b – b ≥ a

Let us also suppose that my notes with the “a ≥ b” and “b ≥ a” statements are temporally distant so that I forgot about them and furthermore that these notes are linked to other documents, so that I cannot insert them directly in p. We can also assume that the expressions used in the notes “a ≥ b” and »b≥a« for »a and »b« differ from each other so that Devonthinks AI is not aware, that they treat the same facts.
After some time I’am reviewing p. How will I be aware that p contains a tautology (at least for me) without time consuming hyperlink browsing?
With some wiki-like “what links here” feature this would be very easy, even more if this could be represented visually.
Sorry for this somewhat technical post, but I really like to know if the the application will make it easy for me to treat situations similar to the one outlined here in a natural and intuitive way.

4

Linking doesn’t have any impact on the AI at the moment.

There’s no such feature right now but it might be added to a future release (although not in the near future).

5

I agree with Dilano that DT should include the capability to add a quick annotation to an item and have an icon appear in the small bar above the edit window as notification that there is an associated annotation. It is fine to allow for a link to the target item from an RTF note, but it would be helpful to have something visible while in the target item to notify the user that there is an associated note and to allow the user to go to it.