Personal Knowledge Base Workflow

I ran across a blog post back in 2014 where the author had a list of 11 requirements for a Personal Knowledge Base (PKB). I have had the response that I dust off occasionally and half-heartedly keep up to date over the years sitting on my file server so I thought I would share it here for posterity. The one requirement I would add that I still have not adequately found a good solution for is mobile access and workflow.

PKB Requirements

1. Minimal Effort to Capture and Maintain
   • Export Highlighted Text in PDF (Acrobat)
   • Using Automator and Preview
   • Markdown
   • Safari Webarchives or CLI webarchiver
     • Chromium based browsers support MHTML if preferred.
   • Bookmarklets – Bookcision to get highlights from kindle books
2. All in one Place
   • All in the filesystem on your machine, and portable with Dropbox, Syncthing, Google Drive or Nextcloud
3. Non-proprietary (open source) file formats
   • Markdown (plain text)
   • PDF
   • MP3
   • MP4 (h.264), Youtube link, Youtube-dl
   • jpeg or png
   • webarchive (mostly portable) or MHTML (portable)
4. Ability to accept various kinds of input (text, video, audio, etc.)
   • See Item 3
5. Linkability
   • Store PKB in Dropbox (See Item 2 – not iCloud because you can’t link to files in it), a link can be generated using the Finder context menu.
6. Semi-automated input and organization
   • Combination of using built in tools (e.g. Safari, Preview, etc.) and Automator/Python/Bash scripts.
   • Also utilize a files metadata cmd + i
7. Searchable
   • Spotlight
8. Multiple organization schemes
   • Combination of folder structure, Make Alias from Finder context menu, and Smart folders
9. Web-based
   • Not exactly web based, but since every object can have a url, you can use a Wiki, WordPress, Blogger etc.
10. Accessible and operable via Graphical (GUI) and Command-Line interfaces
    • Since this scheme only uses tools that ship with OS X (mostly) you can generally do both.
    • Applications used:
      • Safari or Chromium based browser
      • Preview
      • Sublime Text 2 or VIM
      • Finder
      • Automater
      • Python 3
      • Bash
      • Marked 2
      • Alfred
11. Cross platform
    • While designed for MacOS, the files are cross platform. I don’t use Windows, but assume that you could find tools that are similar to accomplish the same thing in Windows and certainly on Linux.