How People Manage Knowledge in their "Second Brains"- A Case Study with Industry Researchers Using Obsidian

Abstract: People face overwhelming information during work activities, necessitating effective organization and management strategies. Even in personal lives, individuals must keep, annotate, organize, and retrieve knowledge from daily routines. The collection of records for future reference is known as a personal knowledge base. Note-taking applications are valuable tools for building and maintaining these bases, often called a ''second brain''. This paper presents a case study on how people build and explore personal knowledge bases for various purposes. We selected the note-taking tool Obsidian and researchers from a Brazilian lab for an in-depth investigation. Our investigation reveals interesting findings about how researchers build and explore their personal knowledge bases. A key finding is that participants' knowledge retrieval strategy influences how they build and maintain their content. We suggest potential features for an AI system to support this process.