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David edited this page May 31, 2026 · 1 revision

Tag Taxonomy

19 built-in sigils organized into 4 semantic families. Each tag routes downstream to one of five encoding frameworks — those framework names show up in the Anki CSV export.

Anchor — who, when, where

Named entities. The skeleton of a narrative.

Sigil Name Captures Route
N Name people / things / titles HEART
D Date when something happened CAST
P Place where something happened CAST

Meaning — concepts and questions

What things are and what's unclear about them.

Sigil Name Captures Route
Def Definition concept identity NEDF
Mn Meaning what the concept means here (child of Def) NEDF
Ex Example concrete instance of a concept (child of Def) NEDF
An Analogy comparison that clarifies (child of Def) NEDF
Q Question what is unclear / open * (any)

Def is the keystone tag — every Def becomes a hub page in Concepts/<canonical>.md and a node in the Atlas graph. Mn/Ex/An attach to a Def via the parent field, so they show up in their parent concept's hub.

Structure — relations, evidence, limits

The shape of an argument.

Sigil Name Captures Route
R Relation X causes / supports / depends on Y CAST
Ev Evidence data / case that supports a relation (child of R) CAST
C Constraint limit on the system SPEAR
B Bottleneck choke point SPEAR
L Delay effect appears later CAST
T Tradeoff gain X vs lose Y CAST
X Tension contradiction or conflict CAST
Opp Opposite view alternative / opposing stance (child of X) CAST
Assump Assumption unstated requirement CAST

R-tagged spans drive the Relation graph integration — write things like "cognition depends on attention" and the plugin extracts the relation for Mermaid / Canvas output.

Execution — what to do, how to check

The action layer.

Sigil Name Captures Route
A Action what to do (method / procedure step) SPEAR
M Measure how to know it worked (signal / prediction) ORACLE

A-tagged spans flow into the Tasks MOC, Tasks app push, and ICS calendar export. M tags become cards in the review queue.

The five encoding frameworks (route field)

Each tag has a route pointing at one of:

  • NEDF — Note → Encode → Define → Frame. Concept-heavy notes (Def, Mn, Ex, An).
  • CAST — Causes, Anchors, Sequences, Tradeoffs. Structural notes (R, Ev, D, P, L, T, X, Opp, Assump).
  • SPEAR — Sharp, Pointed, Engineered, Action, Repeat. Operational notes (C, B, A).
  • HEART — Humanized, Emotional, Active, Resonant, Truthful. Story / character notes (N).
  • ORACLE — Outcomes, Rules, Anticipated, Calibrated, Lessons, Evaluated. Measurement notes (M).

The Anki CSV exporter writes one CSV per framework — so a vault export gives you five focused decks rather than one bloated one.

Tags routed to * (currently Q) get exported into every framework's deck — questions cross-cut all categories.

Tag hierarchy

Three tags have parents (parent field):

  • Mn, Ex, An → parent Def
  • Ev → parent R
  • Opp → parent X

In the Sheet view, child tags appear directly under their parents. In the Public API, queries.concepts() aggregates child mentions under the parent's hub.

Adding your own

Two paths:

  1. Vault-wide custom tags — Settings → Custom tags. Each tag carries sigil, name, family (must be one of Anchor / Meaning / Structure / Execution), optional parent, optional keyBinding, and light/dark colors. Universal — applies to every note.
  2. Domain Profiles — semantic_domain: <name> in frontmatter swaps in a domain-specific toolkit. Each profile bundles its own tags + a merge mode (add / subset / replace).

Custom and domain tags route to * by default (cross-framework). Set route explicitly to confine them.

See also

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