Great discussion, thanks for your comments!
This is the workflow I am targeting, more in-depth discussion is at Scientific Workflows with Zotero (currently this doesn’t work, due to relative paths not working):
- I capture items into Zotero (mostly journal articles and books with attached documents).
- Each item comes with lots of tags, both my own and automatic, but I’ve also heavily sorted items into hierarchical Zotero Collections (these are 1:n relationships, one item can be in multiple collections)
- I annotate the item. Currently I do so in Zotero, but I would like to switch to Logseq to use a link graph because Zotero’s annotation mechanism, which has only tags at the page level, seem to be exactly what you are advocating against.
- Once there is a way to import notes from Zotero to Logseq, I’d be happy to stop using Zotero notes to stay sane, but of course it would be wonderful if we get to the point of a 2-way integration.
- In Logseq, each Zotero-item would have a single page associated with it, this page holds the annotations copied from the pdf, screenshots etc.
- Not all data ingress in from Zotero, I might also create pages for conferences, videos etc. directly.
- Once I have extracted the important information (one page per article), I create other pages as needed and heavily link back to the original pages. These pages could be for a subject area, a topic, or for an article that I am writing. These pages heavily rely on the grap for linking between different blocks.
- All of the pages, both imported and manually created, very naturally sit in well-defined natural hierarchies that are meaningful to me as well as to other people in the same field.
- I would like to browse the graph by these hierarchies. In the Knowledge Management for Tags proposal, I gave the following example for searches that can be automatically generated from library records:
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- /Books/ByAuthor/Jameson/William
- /Books/ByYear/2004
- /Dewey/History and geography/History of Europe
- /LCC/World History and …/History (General)/World War II … /Naval Operations/Anglo-German…
- /animals/…/…/Mammalia/…/Felinae/…/F. catus
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- I would also like to use my existing tags and collections. Zotero collections are (poly)hierarchical tags, but Logseq doesn’t yet understand that one tag can be a generalization of another. For example, selecting “animals” in Zotero will shows all sub-collections, e.g. mammals and cats, but Logseq can’t use this information.
- Also, I would like to edit tags and their relationships independently of the locations where they are used. I have plenty of automatic tags in Zotero that I still need to classify, I would like to be able to place these tags onto my hierarchy so that I can easily reference the pages and blocks that are thus tagged, including future imports that use these tags.
Should I import all my existing information from Zotero or just reference it? That is a difficult question, but it is not material to my issue. I already have a huge amount of notes in Zotero, and it would be nice to eventually get this information into the Logseq graph, but even if I just add the items as I go through them one at a time I would very quickly run into the same problem. Currently @Aryan’s Zotero plugin is set up is to create a (Logseq) page when a Zotero item is cited, so referencing already is importing. I think this is a reasonable solution.