kareina

Today was a good work day as I started the day reading in the Obsidian discord channel and learned of a few things that will be useful later, and others that are already useful. This inspired me to start working on my proof of concept SEAD database structure Obsidian vault.

In the long run I want to be able to export the entire database structure and import it into Obsidian, with links between everything that is connected and properties for all of the import information attached to each type of data.

But that is going to take time and lots of learning and experiments. So for today I have started a database structure vault that has a few folders for thing like Location, Sample, Analysis, etc, and put at least a couple notes under each, and created properties for links between them (as daughter or parent, so that the graph view connection lines show the arrows going in the same direction as in the pdf we have that shows the database structure). Then I applied colour coding to the folders so that each will have the same colour as in that pdf, and applied groups in the graph view based on the folders, with colour coding to match.

So far it is a tiny hint of the full database structure, but it is working exactly how I want it to.

![[tmp_1756481175025.jpg]]

So I sent a message to my colleague, Roger, who also uses Obsidian and showed him the photo, and he pointed out that to get the full structure I can use

Visio, and provided a link. He also commented that he has been looking for a good way to graphically present the database structure, and agrees that Obsidian may be the tool to accomplish this.

But by then it was pretty much 13:00, and I needed to quit work for the day to åack for the event (a little early, but I have put in a few nine hour days to make this possible).

I also needed to eat lunch, so by the time I finished packing bedding, projects, banners and food (clothes and archery stuff and the mattress were already in the can last night), had cleaned the kitchen and emptied the cat sand and trash, and fed the cats, it was already 16:00, and Keldor was already off work for the day and taking a nap at his dad's house.

So I picked up his package that arrived today (new arrow points, we'd packed the arrows waiting for points), and drove up to Skelleftehamn to pick him up.

Now we are heading to a store to get him a few last minute things, then we are on our way to Skördefest, a local SCA event at the larp village about half an hour north of Skellefteå.

Is for a Senior Research Assistant in Digital Archaeology to work with the new
http://swedigarch.se/ database.

The job sounds interesting, and I love the short form of the project title: SweDigArch because of the multilingual shades of meaning one gets.

Swe for Sweden, of course, but I also see "sweet", as in that's a sweet project.

Dig for digital, or for "dig" the Swedish word for "you", because this project is being done for you, the one who will be using the database, or for "dig", as in what archaeologists do to uncover the artefacts, or for really digging into the data, but also in the sense of "I really dig this project".

Arch for archaeology, but also for the way this database builds an arch across disciplines connecting us with data, and includes (or will, in the fullness of time) all of the Swedish archaeological data under its broad-reaching arch.

But you know what I am really looking forward to asking them? How do they pronounce that short form of the name? What do they say when talking amongst themselves? Does it take the English or the Swedish pronunciation? Does Arch become Ark when spoken?

I have previously managed to organize information about rock thin sections in a spreadsheet, but one winds up with lots of extra columns needed to keep track of everything, and lots of empty cells since not every mineral appears in every rock, and not all possible information about each mineral is recorded for every sample. Therefore I have been thinking of creating a database to keep track of it, but am running into issues with the design phase.

I have found pages on line that describe how to "normalize" your data to make certain you aren't wasting storage space on redundant data. One of them had an example where they started with one table that contains a list of student numbers, the name of each student's advisors, the room number of the advisor, and all of the classes each student takes. They then point out that it is better to break this into separate tables, and after a few steps they wound up with one table for showing which students have which advisor, one table showing which advisor has which room, and one which shows which students take what classes.

I can follow this logic, and if I had so few levels of information I would already be done creating my database. However, geology is more complicated than that.

( a summary of what all I have that I want to beat into a database. Please read if you can give me any advice as how best to group this stuff into appropriate tables )

I suspect that to those of you who are used to working with databases this will seem like a very simple, straightforward, easy to solve problem. If so, please tell me how to approach this! How many tables to I need to create? How do I best link them?

Current Mood: cheerful

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Structure diagram

Next week's job interview

seeking advice on setting up a database

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January 2026

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