Although I have been very interested in this work, I have to admit I haven’t fully reviewed and understood the proposal, so apologies if this is clearly laid out in the roadmap or in the threads.
But I was hoping for a quick clarification of my understanding:
The Reference Entity feature (discribed here) is intended to extend unstructured text with links to structured date (i.e. fibery entities). This was already possible before in some form with the System Reference Database (from any database to any other). However, with the new User Reference Database, it is possible to add more structured context to the reference itself (with the only limitation being limits on number of sources & targets, at least for now). As such it finds its best use in identifying insights & ideas, indicating related entities (concepts, people, projects, metrics, etc.) and providing some data on things like degree of relevance, … and providing ways of measuring & reporting on these references.
The Polymorphic Relations feature is intended to extend the relationship model between structured entities/data to be more flexible than fibery’s existing entity relation model. My understanding of this work is that whereas relations limit the source and target of relations to one type as well as very rigidly & specifically define the context/type of relationship between entities, polymorphic relations would allow not only mixing of different sources and targets but also (hopefully) richer description of the relations without a need to create a relation field for each type of relation (e.g. separate many-to-many fields for “relatives” and “co-workers” and “friends” …) or creating separate join table to support the relation model. I can see two types of uses:
- Being able to select different types as targets would allow curation of specialized entities with similar relations together (e.g. being able to capture a person’s attendance in different types of meetings, events, etc. in a consolidated relation)
- An equally useful feature would come from the properties of the relations through representing semantic relationships between entities (on the edges), for example between people (e.g. John is Jimmy’s brother, John is Tina’s partner, John and Amy worked together) or a persons employment history which links people and their roles to organizations/companies along with a temporal context (all useful things to have in a CRM).
Is this more or less aligned with how these features are viewed by the fibery team?
If the above is true, I think that there is one type of relation which is not covered by this: relation one between unstructured/text data (i.e. text block in one entity/document and another). This is currently not possible in fibery (apart from hyperlinks to titles). However, it is covered under block references or transclusion blocks in tools like Roam or Obsidian. Does this make sense?