Tags, links and the knowledge graph

Kancil holds a dozen kinds of record, and most of its value comes from how they connect. There are three mechanisms, and they are not interchangeable.

Tags: grouping

A tag is a label with a colour that you attach to many records. Tags answer which things are like this? — everything for a client, everything urgent, everything to revisit in the spring.

Tags have a kind, so the tag list does not become one flat pile shared by unrelated parts of the app. Manage them in Tags.

Use a tag when the grouping is open-ended and you will want to list its members later.

Links: relating

A link is an edge between two specific records: this task belongs to that deal. Links are polymorphic — both ends are just a type and an id — which is why any kind of record can link to any other without a table per pairing.

The "Related" picker on a detail page offers six types: projects, tasks, contacts, companies, deals and calendar events. Those are the things you normally relate by hand.

A few types are linkable but not through that picker:

• People are reached through their contact card.
• Email, notes, invoices and expenses are linked by the feature that owns them — an attachment on an expense, a note on a record — rather than by picking from a list.
• Bank transactions link outward only. You link from a transaction to the thing it paid for, never the reverse, because that is the direction the Bank worklist works in.

Use a link when the relationship is specific and you would want to follow it in either direction.

The graph: exploring

The knowledge graph draws links as a network. It has two modes: ego, which starts from one record and walks outward, and whole graph, which shows everything you have linked, capped so it stays legible.

The graph adds one node type that is not a stored link: email addresses, derived by matching addresses across records. That is why a contact and a company can appear connected in the graph without anyone having linked them — they share a correspondent.

Use the graph when you do not yet know what you are looking for.

Choosing

Question	Reach for
What else is like this?	a tag
What is this specific thing connected to?	a link
What does the neighbourhood look like?	the graph

Tags and links are cheap and reversible. The usual failure is over-tagging — a tag applied to one record is a note, not a grouping.