Research Vault

A vault for structured research — investigation, analysis, and synthesis across topics.

Workflow

1. Discuss research questions in Buzz channels — #research, #general, wherever the question arises.
2. Declare — when a research thread is worth keeping, @hermes-agent logs it here as a new topic directory.
3. Investigate — the agent populates index.md with findings and creates detail files as the research grows.
4. Synthesize — when research concludes, the index.md summary is finalized and status moves to concluded.

Structure

Each research topic is a directory at the vault root with an index.md entry point:

<topic-slug>/
  index.md              ← frontmatter + summary + key findings (the entry point)
  sources.md            ← links, references, data sources
  analysis.md           ← deep analysis, findings
  methodology.md        ← how the research was conducted
  notes.md              ← working notes, raw observations
  summary.md            ← final synthesis (when concluded)
  next-steps.md         ← follow-up questions, gaps

• Small topics: just index.md alone in the directory.
• Big topics: split into detail files as they grow. Link them from index.md with path-qualified wikilinks (e.g. [[topic-slug/sources|Sources]]) to avoid ambiguous basenames across topics.
• Detail file names are up to you — sources, analysis, methodology, notes, summary, next-steps are common patterns.

Umbrella topics

Some topics are umbrella hubs (e.g. agent-infra) whose job is composition: they frame a general research area and link to subtopic directories. Umbrellas are ordinary topic directories — keep the actual research in the subtopics, and tag subtopics with the umbrella's tag (e.g. agent-infra) for filtering.

Frontmatter (in index.md)

---
title: One-line summary
description: Short description for search results and link previews
status: exploring | active | concluded | shelved
category: market | technical | competitive | legal | scientific | exploratory
tags: []
draft: true
created: YYYY-MM-DD
updated: YYYY-MM-DD
origin: buzz://<channel-uuid>/<event-id>
---

• description — improves search results, link previews, RSS, and SEO when published via Quartz.
• draft: true — excludes the topic from the published site. Set draft: false when ready to publish.
• created / updated — Quartz recognizes these for date display and sorting.

Categories

Categories are in frontmatter, not folders — every topic lives at the vault root.

Category	Kind of research
market	Market analysis, sizing, trends
technical	Technology evaluation, architecture research, tool comparison
competitive	Competitor analysis, landscape mapping
legal	Regulatory, compliance, legal landscape
scientific	Literature review, paper analysis
exploratory	Open-ended investigation, "what is X"

Status Lifecycle

exploring → active → concluded
                 ↘ shelved

• exploring — just started, gathering sources, scoping the question
• active — ongoing research, regularly updated
• concluded — findings synthesized, research complete
• shelved — parked, may revisit

Bases

Open Research Base (in bases/research-base.base) to see all topics as a filterable, sortable table — by status, category, tags, or date. Only index.md files appear; detail files are excluded via the file.name == "index.md" filter.

Graph View

Wikilinks between detail files within a topic, and between topics, create a knowledge graph visible in Obsidian's graph view. Use path-qualified links ([[topic-slug/sources|Sources]]) to avoid ambiguous basenames. Tags make topics discoverable and filterable but do not themselves create graph edges — only links do.

Note: cross-vault wikilinks (e.g. to idea-dump entries) only work if both vaults are directories within the same Obsidian vault. If publishing via Quartz, links can only resolve within the same content tree — use public URLs for cross-site references.

Publishing (Future)

The vault is structured for eventual publication as a public knowledge base:

• Quartz (recommended) — free static site generator for Obsidian vaults. Preserves wikilinks, backlinks, graph view, and full-text search. Self-hostable via NixOS.
• Obsidian Publish — paid, simplest, but not self-hosted.

The index.md + wikilink structure means the published site will render as a connected knowledge graph, not a flat list of documents. The draft frontmatter field controls which topics are published.