Personal Knowbase Basic Terminology

Three basic terms can get you started using Personal Knowbase. With these three terms, the functions of most menu commands and toolbar buttons are clear. Other menu commands involve more advanced features that can usually be ignored when you're getting started.

Article

"Article" is Personal Knowbase's term for a single unit of text information. An article has a title, date, time, content (text), and any number of keywords. Other note organization software may refer to this unit as a "card" or a "note." The text portion of the article can be any length.

A single Personal Knowbase data file is a collection of any number of articles. The titles of articles in the currently open data file are listed in the Titles column of the main Index Window.

You can also assign attachments to external files or URLs to articles.

Keyword

A "keyword" is a word or phrase that you assign to one or more articles as a means of indexing your articles. The keywords in the currently open data file are listed in the Index column of the main Index Window.

Use keywords to retrieve related items quickly. This keyword-based system was designed like common online research databases of the 1990's, such as Dialog and Knowledge Index, or like CompuServe's early file library, and is similar to the keywords Index for a MS Help file. Those familiar with the HTML META tags will recognize this term in the original purpose of the "keywords" META tag.

In recent Internet usage, such keywords are now often referred to as "tags".

Bookmark

A "bookmark" marks any article for instant access. Bookmarks are a handy way to mark favorite articles or ones you are currently working with.

Early versions of Personal Knowbase used the term "tag" for marking articles. But over the years, the term "tag" became ambiguous as its use on the Internet evolved and proliferated. It can now refer to HTML or XML markup, hashtags, tagged photos, and even keywords. We eliminated this term to reduce confusion.

That's It!

Those three terms are all you need to get started with PK.

You can find more information on the primary PK terms and concepts in our Help system.

The Help system also includes a Glossary with links to more information on most terms.