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Organizing locations (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/obsidianmd

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After reading this post on how to organize people in Obsidian, I finally started doing it myself.

Immediately I was faced with a new problem: how do I organize locations? I could think of two ways to deal with it from the top of my head:

Each location has its own note, which is then cross-linked. So department would be linked to company which would be linked to the city where it is located.
Hierarchy inside a few notes. This would look like [[country#subregion#city#company#department]]

The second option would result in fewer scattered notes, but I'm unsure if that is actually desirable.

What system do you have?

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[–] Markimus 2 points 1 year ago

The question is do you really need to organise by location, or are you just organising for the sake of organising?

What is it that you hope to be able to do by organising by location?

[–] Markimus 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I often save pins of notable locations on Google Maps. I don't keep that stuff in Obsidian.

If you want to link that to a note, maybe you could reference a note ID on the pin.

[–] Coolishguy 1 points 1 year ago

My thought is to use separate notes for each. Then link to the parent in a dedicated field of the frontmatter (which will be nicely formatted as a link if you're on 1.4). In each location that might have sub-locations, use a dataview query to list all of its immediate children. There might even be a way with dataviewjs to list all of the people in a given region by traversing the "tree" of successive links.

[–] Campers 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

One of the limitations of Obsidian linking, and any markdown linking to be precise, is the fact that you cannot define the type of link. So, just use sentences next to the links. This way, you can evolve your locations saying what is in , next to or part of

As an example of evolving your locations and making the connections flexible, imagine that I start working on locations I care about. I am naming the locations and then slapping note content as they evolve.

[[Company A note]]
***
tags: #location
***
 -  a company is inside a [[City A]]

[[Department A note]]
***
tags: #location
***
 - this department is inside [[Company A HQ]]

[[Company A HQ note]]
***
tags: #location
***
 -  is inside a [[City A]]

While developing my location notes I clearly mentioned a company as a location which I later find out it is wrong. Specially because Company A has warehouses in two cities. Fixing now.

[[Company A note]]
 - owns various locations
   - owns [[Company A HQ note]]
   - owns [[Company A Warehouse 1 note]]
   - owns [[Company A Warehouse 1 note]]

[[Company A HQ note]]
***
tags: #location
***
 - is in [[City A note]]
[[Company A Warehouse 1 note]]
***
tags: #location
***
 - is in [[City A note]]

[[Company A Warehouse 2 note]]
***
tags: #location
***
 - is in [[City B note]]
 - is in [[ABC Industrial Complex note]]

[[ABC Industrial Complex note]]
***
tags: #location
***
 - is just outside [[City B note]]

My point is that you need to use sentences as ways to link locations. And maybe use tags to keep track of what is or is not a location. Things change after all.

Also, if you have not done this already, please enable "Show backlinks" to keep track of notes linking to the one you are working on if you have not done that already. It is massively useful.