Main idea

A set of notes linked to one another holds contents and links. It holds nothing of what is needed to use them to move forward on a product opportunity.

Three questions show it, and none has an answer in the graph. Two notes contradict each other: which one holds today, and who settled it? An entire area of the subject is undocumented: how do you see that, since a hole produces no note? A trade-off between two options was settled three weeks ago: where is it written, who made it, and does it still hold?

These three objects — the inconsistency, the state of completeness, the decision and its justification — are not contents among others. They bear on the state of the corpus itself, and they therefore demand places of their own: dedicated files, kept up to date, distinct from the notes. A flat file carries them no better than a network does: what is missing is not the list form or the graph form, it is the layer that speaks about the knowledge rather than about the subject.

A product description meets the same three objects, and houses them the same way: a block of discrepancies per sheet, separate from the body, carrying the divergences between what the product does and what it should do; a coverage counter per enumeration angle, giving the state of completeness; and, for every object without a sheet, a written decision — business object, or plumbing. The rejected discrepancy stays there with its reason, and so does the decision. The layer that speaks about the knowledge is therefore not reserved for domains of thought: it takes the same place in a technical reference model.

Layer added by "I wrote a product's ontology. Three times, I thought I was done." (2026-08-11).

Why it matters

This separates two things we usually pile into the same tool: what we know, and what we know about what we know. The second layer is the one that lets you pick up a file three weeks later without rereading everything, and it is the one no note-taking tool provides by default.

It also gives an evaluation criterion: faced with a knowledge setup, ask where the current contradictions, the uncovered areas and the decisions are written down. The absence of an answer is the diagnosis.

Nuances and limits

Keeping these files is work, and work that produces nothing visible. On a short subject, it costs more than it returns.

And a tracked contradiction is not a resolved contradiction: the setup makes visible what remains to be settled, it does not settle it.

Open questions

• What, in a corpus, makes it possible to detect a contradiction nobody has flagged?