Applications

Zettelkasten

indexia was originally designed for projects which employ the Zettelkasten, or “slip box”, method of notetaking. A template data structure for these projects is available through eidola.Templates:

from indexia.eidola import Templates

db = 'test.db'
generator = Templates(db)
objects = generator.build_template('zettelkasten')

The tables in this template are designed to answer questions about the project:

  • scribes: Who? Which member of the project created the document?

  • libraries: Where? Where is the document stored?

  • cards: When? When was the document created?

    • The order of documents can be determined relatively if the project uses alphanumeric IDs, or absolutely if it uses datetime IDs.

  • keywords: What? What information does the document contain?

Generalization

This out-of-the-box Zettelkasten is a useful application of indexia, but it is not the only one. The 'zettelkasten' template is only one example of a general, hierarchical data model employed by the indexia package. Another application of this model, cataloging philosophers & their works, can be seen in Usage.

In general, indexia is well suited to any project involving hierarchical data or tree structures. These data structures can be used to model

  • Parent-child relationships

  • Object-attribute relationships

  • Sequential processes or decision trees

In addition to creating & managing data for these applications, indexia helps with generating graphs & representations of hierarchical data. The Corpus, Dendron, & Diktua classes of indexia.schemata display hierarchical data as dataframes, XML trees, & network graphs, respectively.

Note on indexia data

The indexia data model is easy to use & highly extensible, but note that it is very restrictive. Currently, the classes of indexia.schemata, which render & display data, expect the following to hold true of all tables:

  • There is a primary key column named id

  • There is one & only one attribute field (stored as type TEXT)

  • creator tables have no foreign key relationships

  • creature tables have one & only one foreign key relationship

Future releases may allow for greater flexibility. Also note that although the relationships between indexia tables are hierarchical in nature, the implementation uses foreign keys in a sqlite database (i.e., indexia is not a pure implementation of the hierarchical database model). For table definitions & SQL operations, see inquiry in Reference.