The "old-school" way to do this is to design well-structured file formats which multiple pieces of software can operate on. TimBL proposes bringing this to the SaaS world via SOLID and modern flexible schema formats. Web3 folks have related proposals.
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Another angle: I'm intrigued by the possibility of a "lens file": what if my PDF annotator can "save a Markdown lens" which contains my annotations. The difference from an export, though, is that the lens would be "live", with a bidi scheme for handling changes.
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That is, if I add new annotations in my PDF annotator, they're added to the .md (without disturbing other content in the file); if an annotation is altered in the .md, that's reflected in the viewer app.
(Doing this well requires careful format design! Maybe Cambria could help?)
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Now, there are lots of problems with the "files and folders" paradigm. Lots of people have trouble understanding it, even decades after its introduction! But they do seem to understand app silos. There's probably a good abstraction to be discovered here which mixes the worlds.
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The typical web answer here is APIs, but APIs are much worse than standardized file formats: each pairwise edge needs its own impl. N^2 vs N. Pity poor Readwise's engineers; worse, if you have a different idea for a Readwise-alike, you must build all this to achieve parity.
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Anyway: I get annoyed every time I see "export" offered as a workflow solution, particularly for "critical path" knowledge work stuff, because I know that I'll have to do lots of manual schlepping of data, and inevitably, I'll end up with different versions in different places.
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In the case of annotating PDFs and images, I use content addressable storage for the files and s-expression formatted metadata in “files”* that decorates them with positional OCR, my annotations, and so on.
* on a virtual file system backed with a DB
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!! Fascinating. Can you say more about this workflow? I'm guessing you don't add the positional s-exprs by hand?
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This is a system-wide knowledge management thing I’ve been using/building for decades. It’s hard to explain in a tweet. I do most text manipulation in emacs, but because of the FS interface to my documents and knowledge graph it’s easy to script all sorts of things as well.
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Sounds fascinating. Any chance you have (or would be willing to) record a video showing this in action?
I’ve owed several people, especially , such a video for ages. Hopefully I’ll have space in my schedule to make one sometime in the next few months. 😊
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