What makes a good knowledge graph

Here are some tips on how to organize your knowledge graph effectively.

What is a knowledge graph? It's just a set of notes that may or may not be connected to each other.

Essentially, there are four main principles.

Chunked

Many people make the mistake of trying to shove too much information into a single note. The note becomes harder to read and understand. A better approach is to break down the information into smaller notes, and make sure there are links pointing to the related notes.

It's also convenient to create a meta note or contents note which serves as a table of contents for a specific topic. This note contains links to all the related notes on that topic and might have some high-level overview.

Structure

Your notes can be structured using standard markdown syntax. You can use headings, lists, code blocks, etc. to structure data within a note. This is important because it allows you to quickly scan and understand the content. Also the structured data is easy to remember and recall.

Discoverable

While you can use a full-text search to find a note you need, it's much better to use tags to organize your notes. It's much easier to find a note by its tag, because it's something meaningful to you. For example, if I have a note on a UK economy growth book, it might have tags like #BookReview, #Economy, #UK.

Connected

Notes might be connected with each other. Connections are nice, because they create a new way to look at things. If I read something related to something I wrote before, I will link the new note to the old one, to provide some additional context. Links are easy to create, just add something like Similar thought on the UK economy, where 123 is the id of the note you want to link to.

How to review notes

Note review is the cornerstone in space-repetition learning. But it's not only about improving retention, it's also another opportunity to improve your knowledge graph. Oftentimes, when the times come for a review, you can either add some new information, rethink how the note is structured, add some new connections, or even delete the note altogether if you don't find it useful anymore. So the review process is not only about improving retention, but also about improving the quality of your knowledge graph.