The Mintter team is doing some experiments using Backlinks of documents to list related documents. The experiment consist on creating a document with the title as a "Tag" like #Project. Then on every "Project" document, we include a link to it.
The result is something like this:
Screenshot of the Mintter app showing the "#Project" document and the Citations panel open.
As you can see here. This is an alternative way to group related documents in the system.
While Backlinks is a feature embedded to the protocol since its foundation, We found some problems when dealing with what we are showing and how we deal with time for both documents (the main document and the document with the link). If you are curious about how backlinks work in Hypermedia, you can read this other document
This project aims to answer two main questions:
Is this use case relevant to our users?
What is the relevant information we need to show about citations/backlinks and what's the relationship with time?
Solution
Is this use case relevant to our users?
I believe Users need to organize information however it works best for them. I find using the backlinks information a valuable tool to enable users organize data to their needs.
So yes, I believe this particular use case is relevant to users.
What is the relevant information we need to show about citations/backlinks and what's the relationship with time?
Let's remind ourselves that we are talking about the relationship between two entities (currently documents but it will be true for all the other entities in the near future), and each entity have a different Time axis. Here are some of the problems we found when dealing with this situation: