Notats

Notats is a term used in information management to describe a modular framework for digital notes and annotations that emphasizes interconnectedness, provenance, and portable data. It can refer to a data schema, a set of tooling, or a guiding philosophy for organizing knowledge across digital environments.

Core components of the Notats concept treat notes as discrete units with metadata such as identifiers, creation and modification timestamps, authorship, and tags. Notes can link to other notes, documents, or web pages through back-links and bidirectional references, supporting graph-based organization and rich interconnections. The content of a Notat can range from plain text to structured blocks that may include code, images, or attachments. Data models associated with Notats are designed to be human-readable and portable, commonly expressed in JSON, YAML, or similar formats, to facilitate export, import, and interoperability.

Interoperability and tooling are central to Notats. The framework advocates open interfaces and APIs to connect editors, note-taking apps, and reference-management tools, enabling offline work with later synchronization. Use cases span education, research, software development, and personal knowledge management, where users build knowledge graphs, perform faceted searches, and leverage backlinks to enhance information retrieval and context.

The Notats concept emerged in discussions about scalable note-taking, knowledge organization, and information provenance in the early 2020s. Since then, various open-source projects and commercial products have explored Notats-inspired data models and exchange mechanisms. While there is no single universal standard, ongoing experimentation and community-driven development continue to shape how Notats-like approaches are adopted in digital knowledge work.