Any way to uniquely identify an event?

[Recon]

I’m using Obsidian as my canon Repository of Knowledge, with the exception of actual dates, which I’m leaving to Aeon. But I’ve run into a bit of a snag with my workflow.

I’ll put an event in the timeline with an approximate date and everything is wonderful with it. I can move the event if I need to fit it somewhere else. It’s great.

I will also have a note in Obsidian with a verbose and formatted description of the event, linking to all the relevant story concepts within the complex web of notes in my Obsidian vault.

The problem is, I have no way to link the two. If I have an event called “Bob goes to the store” that takes place on April 1, for example, I can make a note in Obsidian called “Bob goes to the store - April 1”. But then if I decide to change the date to April 5, my Obsidian note’s name will need to be updated. Or I could just leave the title in Obsidian as “Bob goes to the Store” just like in Aeon. Problem is, I might also have a separate event called “Bob goes to the Store” that takes place on June 10. Obsidian needs names to be unique, so I will need a way to tie the events together.

What I wonder is if there’s a way to get a unique name on the Aeon side, where I can use that in the Obsidian doc, so even if I move the date in Aeon, I don’t have to worry about updating anything in Obsidian.

[Jaran]

Can’t you use a fixed “zettlekasten” numbering system for your files in Obsidian and use YAML to sort and order the notes?

Then you can just change the YAML Dates for the Notes, when you change the event in Aeon.

You can use Aliases for the file/note name to link in Obsidian, and you can change the Header 1 of the Note, to reflect any changes.

I do something similar to this, and then I also attach a link to the actual note(file) in AEON.

But, most of my events doesn’t change dates, neither do my notes very often…

Or do you use the “Daily Notes” function for this?

[Recon]

This sounds intriguing. I’m not familiar with the zettlekasten numbering system, so I haven’t looked into that yet. I’m only barely familiar with YAML. I’ve only been using Obsidian for about a month and Aeon for less than two weeks. The project is getting enormous very quickly though, as I spend all my free time importing data from ten years of work into it. Many of the dates in my notes are placeholders, so they’ll get shifted around a fair bit until I’m happy with the arrangement. I’ve simply never had the ability to visualize them before Aeon.

I’ve been using World Anvil (Master subscription), which I’m now very frustrated with because of its extremely clunky and slow interface compared to these new tools. So I’m moving a lot of stuff over from WA as well as Google Docs.

I probably do need to get familiar with YAML integration. I hear a lot about it but haven’t found a good use case yet for my project. This might be a good place to start. Also, for what it’s worth, not all my events need a code because many have unique names. But with a 27,000 year timeline, a lot of things happen more than once in a general sense. I just wish Aeon and Obsidian had some sort of internal linkage. That’s a pipe dream I realize, but wow wouldn’t that be something?

Daily notes: Nope I haven’t been using them for my writing vault. Just my personal vault when writing what I did for the day.

[Peter_T]

In the .aeon files, there are two IDs stored with each item: an UID like D526A93E-E9B0-4C57-A641-F17981487DFC, which is used internally for reference and lookup, and a display ID like EV80, which can be used for csv export and reimport, if I’m not mistaken.
With the latest release of my aeon3obsidian script, I added this ID to the YAML section. I think, it will be easy for you to find out how it works.

[Jaran]

When I say Zettelkasten, I just mean any fixed numbering system or naming system…
But Obsidian have some internal feature for the Zettelkasten system.
I use ISO dates (known start date of the event) and a name for my notes, but that is because most of what I do is historical research, so the start date of an event nearly never change…

But you could just use your own numbering system, say 5 digits or 8 digits.

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If your dates/file names are changing often, you should not use dates in the file names, especially if you want to use the files outside Obsidian, e.g. adding as attachment in Aeon or link to them in another software.

You can run a “running number” system until you are settled.

Personally, I have a “research folder” for anything that is not “written in stone” yet, you can call it temp or “working in progress” or anything you like, when your system is ok, you can just move the notes/files to a “live” folder and change the attachment link in Aeon.

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For your work, as I understand it, I would have used at least 2-3 different subfolders to differentiate the “live storyline”, your temp or research storyline and you personal notes…

I would have used YAML for any metadata, like the following but more that fits your workflow:
(example)

–
type: event
id: 123456789
name: “event name”
start_date:
end_date:
alias: “event name 2”
tags:
keywords:

---

or similar, depending on your needs.

When you start to learn more about Obsidian, I would recommend you to learn about the templates etc., look into some of the plugins you can use, it is a lot of them that might help you out.

I also support what Peter writes…