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 [[wikilinks]].
• Detail file names are up to you — sources, analysis, methodology, notes, summary, next-steps are common patterns.

Frontmatter (in index.md)

---
title: One-line summary
status: exploring | active | concluded | shelved
category: market | technical | competitive | legal | scientific | exploratory
tags: []
created: YYYY-MM-DD
updated: YYYY-MM-DD
origin: buzz://<channel-uuid>/<event-id>
---

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.md) 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.is("index") filter.

Graph View

Wikilinks between detail files within a topic, and between topics via shared tags, create a knowledge graph visible in Obsidian's graph view. Cross-links to index entries (e.g., research that feeds a product idea) work natively since both vaults live under the same Obsidian vault.

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.