Glossary
Visual knowledge base
Definition: a notes/knowledge store that exposes visual structure of its content — a graph view, property-driven table or kanban views, or both — so retrieval can happen by navigation rather than by remembering folder paths.
Plain-English definition
A visual knowledge base is a notes store with visible structure baked in. The "visual" usually means a graph view of how pages link to each other, plus views over properties (table, kanban, cards, calendar). The point isn't drawing — it's making the structure of what you wrote legible.
Common features
- Graph view of pages and the links between them.
- Backlinks panel on each page.
- Property-driven views (table, kanban, calendar) over per-page metadata.
- First-class wikilinks in the editor.
Not the same as
- Whiteboard apps (Heptabase, Miro) — those are drawing canvases, not computed views over real pages.
- Mind mapping tools (XMind, MindNode) — those build single hand-drawn trees, not navigable graphs over many notes.