Links

Type: types/tag-readme.md

This tag gathers notes on how links between KB artifacts work: link labels and relationship semantics, where a link sits and how strongly it commits, backlinks and inbound links, link-following versus search as navigation modes, and lineage links from sources to what was produced from them. The defining note is linking theory, which treats each link as a read-or-skip decision point for the reader and measures link quality as navigation uncertainty removed per token of context. The shipped rules and label catalogue live in the reference page link vocabulary and linking approach. Nearby but different: context-engineering covers routing and loading knowledge into context in general; a note belongs here when its subject is the authored link itself.

Prior work

Typed relationships between knowledge units have deep roots:

• Hypertext theory (Engelbart, 1968; Nelson, 1965) — the original vision of interlinked documents with explicit relationship types, not just navigation.
• Semantic Web / RDF (Berners-Lee, 2001) — subject-predicate-object triples formalize typed links between resources. OWL adds relationship semantics (transitive, symmetric, inverse).
• Library science thesauri (ISO 25964) — standardized relationship types: BT (broader term), NT (narrower term), RT (related term), USE/UF. Decades of practice in what relationship types are worth maintaining.
• Toulmin argumentation — already used in the KB; listed in Reference material below.

Commonplace's link labels are lighter than RDF but heavier than untyped hyperlinks: each collection's COLLECTION.md owns its outbound rules, and labels name the reader need a link serves (link vocabulary). The specific contribution is optimizing for agent navigation under bounded context — links as decision points for read/skip, not just edges in a graph.

Foundations

• Linking theory — links as decision points; grounds the relationship vocabulary, title-as-claim, and position-encodes-strength practices under one model
• Title as claim enables traversal as reasoning — claim titles make link traversal read as reasoning; explains why "since [X]" works but "see [X]" is a different link intent, and where the pattern breaks for multi-claim documents
• Links encode conditional possibilities, not obligations — every label names the reader need under which following pays off; content every reader needs is inlined, not linked

Observations

• Agents navigate by deciding what to read next — links, skills, and index entries are all contextual hints for read/skip decisions
• Link-following and search impose different metadata requirements — link-following is local with context; search is long-range with titles/descriptions; indexes bridge both
• Indexes lower recall when they suppress retrieval that would find more — not a member (tagged kb-maintenance): apparent completeness lowers route recall when it suppresses retrieval that would find more

Analysis

• Inbound and outbound links serve asymmetric reader needs — outbound links are authored reader aids and their on-demand inverse serves four distinct orientation needs; independently useful reciprocal links remain allowed, while the surfacing design space is backlink surfacing
• Link strength is encoded in position and prose — inline premise links carry more weight than footer links; position and prose encode commitment level, creating a weighted graph
• Pointer design tradeoffs in progressive disclosure — fixed, query-time, and crafted retrieval pointers compared on specificity, cost, availability, accuracy, and authoring dependence
• A linked note discharges its own grounding, so a citing note owes representation, not re-grounding — what a link to a reviewed claim note transfers: the citing note must represent it faithfully, not re-ground it
• Source changes should surface downstream review targets, while reverse lineage can remain searchable — when an upstream change is recognized, a forward lineage view should surface dependent artifacts for review; the record itself need not live at the source

Decisions

• 009-link-relationship-semantics — adopts extends/grounds/contradicts/enables/exemplifies vocabulary, borrowed from arscontexta and adapted for agent navigation
• 054-add-adapted-from-and-operationalized-from-lineage-relations — adds the lineage relations used as collection-authorized link labels

Reference material

• Toulmin argument — formal argumentation theory behind link semantics: "since [X]" and "because [Y]" links encode Toulmin warrants connecting grounds to claims; the six-part model (claim/grounds/warrant/qualifier/rebuttal/backing) names the structure argumentative links carry
• Agentic Note-Taking 23: Notes Without Reasons — practitioner validation: an agent inside a curated graph contrasts propositional link semantics ("since [X]") with embedding-based adjacency, arguing the difference is one of kind not degree; strongest external evidence for why link quality (not quantity) determines graph health
• A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents — empirical counterpoint: embedding-based link generation succeeds on QA benchmarks, demonstrating that adjacency-as-linking works for retrieval accuracy even if it lacks propositional semantics; the question is whether the quality gap matters only for navigability and agent reasoning

Related Tags

• context-engineering — routing, loading, and progressive disclosure in general; links are one of its routing mechanisms
• kb-maintenance — lineage staleness, index recall, and keeping links current as artifacts change
• claims-and-grounding — claim titles and grounding obligations that link labels and citations carry