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Ask HN: Best way to create a searchable knowledge base?

20 points aljgz | 1 comments | 16 Oct 25 17:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source

Have you had the experience of using/developing knowledge bases? Here is my scenario:

My team is dealing with a lot of information: Wikis, Code repos, Monitoring dashboards, internal chat messages, emails, Task tickets, related systems, etc.

There are many cases when we need to do ad-hoc searches for anything related to a concept. For instance, imagine if someone makes a change to a metric, there is a need to find all dashboards that might be using this metric to make sure they are still valid after the change.

I don't want to just fix this problem, but create the ability to find related information in ad-hoc cases.

The ramp-up time is not important, as long as some positive value can be created with a small initial effort.

Any existing products (Paid/Free/Open Source, etc) and any references to existing knowledge (designs, discussions) about this would be really appreciated.

1. vladsanchez ◴[17 Oct 25 02:07 UTC] No.45612696[source]▶
I think you need a Zettelkasten, but its data collection from all your sources may be challenging if not an overkill... However, a Zettelkasten stores metadata, which can include tags, subject headings, and unique identifiers that help link and organize notes. This metadata enhances the ability to retrieve and connect related information within the system; not sure how to do so externally.

The key is to store both data and metadata... OpenMetadata may be what you need: https://open-metadata.org/ but I couldn't spot wiki, chat, github nor JIRA connectors :shrug:

Good luck, keep us posted.