For people curious about the Roam API and confused by the syntax, or interested in why Conor went with Datomic/Datascript and not a traditional database, this older talk by Roam developer @mark_bastian is a great overview.

He gives great examples using Spiderman of how even modeling something fairly trivial in SQL is much more complex than in Datomic. But the real kicker is when you're trying to interrogate the data to find recursive relationships.
Right now the Roam data model (at least that's exposed to developers) is just about pages, blocks, and children with tags. Already you can see how finding the page containing a block with a certain tag etc is useful.https://t.co/jWJnuKu1RG
But imagine when attribute relationships are fully represented

You should be able to model the entire Spiderman story in Roam.
Page title: Peter Parker
Child of:: [[Richard Parker]] [[Mary Parker]]
Aliases:: [[Spidey]]

etc, and do these kind of queries.
"Show me quotes about operational efficiency in books by authors who used to be in the military"
"Show me companies in Boise, Idaho, founded by women, whose evaluation is lower than 10X ARR"
Of course, this data can also be used as input to timelines, graphs, etc:

"Show me a graph of my sleep quality versus days in which I ate foods that had gluten in them or not" (where [[bread]] has a page with ingredients::).
One thing I'm curious about is how the Datalog system differs from Wikidata and SparQL, the modeling seems to be kind of similar - you have triplets of entities, like :Oslo :is-a-capital-if :Norway (where all three entities have an id), and you can do graph queries.
So you can ask "Largest city with female mayors", but you can also visualize data in all kinds of ways, like dimensions of elements, children of Genghis Khan, or lighthouses in Norway https://t.co/XvxmEVO9vB
What would it look like to integrate Wikidata with Roam in the future, being able to easily pull in and reference data about entities (cities, authors, scientific concepts)... And build our own Wikidata through inter-Roaming... As well as citations (https://t.co/aP7RSyaGl0) ...

More from Tech

So we had to develop technologies like this to barely manage control over limited areas in Iraq's few urban centers. Only ~8 in 100 Iraqi adults owns a personal vehicle. That rate is > 1 car/adult in America yet I have never seen any doctrine paper or work of fiction address this


We've seen and struggled in civil conflicts with instant, local, universal, distributed communications (cell phone era, basically every conflict since 2000). We've seen and struggled in conflicts with instant, global, universal distributed communications (everything since 2011).

The world's most overfunded military and glow in the dark agencies struggle and largely fail to contain conflicts where fhe vast, vast majority of people are locked into a ~5mi radius of their home.

How can they possibly contain a conflict in a nation with universal car ownership and the most developed road network in the world? The average car can travel over 400 miles on one tank of gas, how can you contain the potential of that kind of mobility?

I think that's partially why the system was so freaked out by 1/6. Yes, most of it is histrionics but you don't decide to indefinitely turn your capital into the Baghdad Green Zone with fortifications and 25k troops over histrionics alone.

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