How does the [[backlink]] syntax work in InfraNodus and what's its difference from LogSeq / Obsidian?

InfraNodus uses the [[back link]] or [[wikilink]] syntax to identify the phrases and entities that should be processed as separate nodes in the network graph and linked together.

It is also used in a similar way in personal knowledge management tools like Obsidian, LogSeq or Roam Research to link ideas together. 

However, there is a difference.

Let's say you have a document called "Network Science" in Obsidian / LogSeq which contains the following sentence:

[[Betweenness centrality]] is a measure of [[influence]]. It is used to understand which [[nodes]] appear most often on the [[shortest path]] between any two randomly chosen nodes in a network.

Both of these tools will build the following graph as a result:

The "host" page [[network science]] is connected to all the other [[backlinks]] mentioned on that page.

However, those pages are not connected to each other. 

This is a problem, because, in fact, we're using [[betweenness centrality]] in the same context as the [[shortest path]]. Roam Research is the only software that takes account of that by providing the information about the backlinks, but it still doesn't show this in a graph.

That's why in InfraNodus we treat these connections slightly differently.We do not only connect the concepts that appear inside a page to that page, but also all the [[backlinks]] that are mentioned in the same context, following the 4-gram logic (a window scan that contains 4 words at a time). So, as a result, you get this graph: 

As you can see, the concepts that are used in the same context, are connected to one another, as well as to the page where they are mentioned. 

This provides a much more precise representation of how the different ideas are connected, allows to perform clustering analysis (which identifies nodes that tend to co-occur together), and rank the concepts using network analysis techniques. 

This approach is used both in our desktop version in our Obsidian graph view plugin.

The advantage becomes particularly apparent when you want to use it on bigger texts. For instance, for a page on various gut microbiota interactions, you'd get these two very different views if you were to use the Obsidian graph view or the InfraNodus graph view:

As you can see, the Obsidian graph view just shows the main page (Gut Microbiota) and how it's connected to other pages. Sure, you can extend the depth and see the connections of this page to other page, but you cannot see any valuable insight from the content on that particular page. Also, if you don't have any wiki links on this page, you won't see any visuals either. 

InfraNodus graph view instead visualizes the connections between the concepts and [[wiki links]] on that page. As a result, you can apply graph science algorithms to perform clustering and rank the nodes by their importance in propagating the meaning in this network. Additionally, you can click on the node and see what other pages it's connected to, but you can do that now without losing the important insights about the local context you're in.

How to Switch InfraNodus Graph View to Obsidian Style Visualization

Our InfraNodus Obsidian extension allows you to switch back to the Obsidian-style view. To do that:

Go to the Settings of the plugin, and:

1. Set "Single Page Processing" to [[Wiki Links Only]] (our default is "[[Wiki Links]] and Concepts")

2. Set Link Mentions To to Parent Page Only (Obsidian Style) (our default is "each other if in the same paragraph")

3. Click Save and Reload

If you are using the main version of InfraNodus, you can achieve the same results when you specify it in the settings while importing your Obsidian page. You can also adjust it in the Text Processing settings of each individual graph (Wiki Links processing: Prioritize Over Text).

How to Convert Your Text to [[Wiki Links]]

If you need to convert any text into the format where the main ideas are the [[wiki links]] to visualize the relations between them, you can use our custom GPT [[Wiki Links]] Converter module or use the entity detection module inside InfraNodus directly.

You can also use the IInfraNodus ontology graph creator to build a [[wiki links]] Obsidian-compatible graph automatically using AI.