The non-concept vocabulary of Structure Beats Magic and Model-Driven Data Engineering: field terms, distinctions and borrowed ideas that deserve a shared definition and a link — but aren't ownable coined concepts (those live in the SBM and MDDE concept libraries, Nick-Milo-style). This is a volatile, promotable layer. A glossary term is lighter than a concept: it can be added fast, it can change, and — crucially — it can be promoted to a concept when it starts carrying real weight (recurs across articles, earns its own name, gets its own article). The rule of thumb: - Concept = a name I coined and own, that does thesis-level work. Gets its own page. - Glossary term = a word the field already owns, or a distinction I draw, that readers need defined. Gets a line here + links.
Designing the shape of information: the entities that matter, how they relate, the rules that hold. Not SQL or tables — the conceptual picture where humans and machines agree on meaning. Jaco's core craft. → Visual Thinking · Drawing It Together; MDDE owns the coined variants Business Friendly Data Modeling · Collaborative Data Modeling.
Data about data: the typed, structured description (schema, meaning, lineage, rules) that makes raw data legible and governable. The layer MDDE treats as the operating system. → Metadata Operating System · Metadata As Code.
A validation that asks "is this believable?" rather than only "is this well-formed?" — catching implausible-but-valid data (a €0 invoice, a date in 2099) that passes schema checks. Part of the validate-don't-guess discipline. → The Validation Loop · The Validated Exchange Layer.
Breaking a body of knowledge into atomic, reusable units and recomposing them into new wholes (article, course, talk) without rebuilding. The Lego move applied to knowledge. → candidate concept; overlaps Play With The Blocks · Content To Training.
The YAML metadata block at the top of a markdown file (type, domain, status, links) that turns a loose note into a queryable data record. The typed fields are the model. → The Vault Is The Data Model (article) · Document Vault.
Plain-text format, greppable and versionable for decades; the open, portable source-of-truth unit for notes, articles and skills. You own the files, not a vendor's database. → Rent The Ai Own The Structure.
Human-readable key-value markup used for frontmatter and config; itself validatable as valid/invalid, so structure can be checked, not hoped for.
Metadata embedded in a photo file (GPS, timestamp, camera) that makes an unstructured photo pile queryable without tagging anything by hand. → article Your Photos Are Already a Map.
Turning GPS coordinates into named places (city, venue) and back; how location data becomes human-readable, with fallbacks when a lookup fails.
The conceptual data-model picture: boxes for entities, lines for relationships, cardinality marks for the rules. The artefact the business signs off on. → Visual Thinking · Drawing It Together.
A pass that reads a record's context (e.g. a day's date) and writes derived facts into it from source data — new data created, not typed. → Derived Insight.
A self-reported profile (aspirational, stale) versus one inferred from actual observed behaviour (current, honest). The gap is why derived data is more valuable. → Derived Insight · A Modeled Self.
The slow divergence between what a system claims is true and what's actually stored or deployed. What one-way publishing and validation exist to prevent. → One Way Publishing; cf. MDDE Semantic Drift.
Niklas Luhmann's method of atomic, densely-linked notes (one idea per note, wired together). The historical root of the modern second brain; SBM's take is "let the AI do the labor, keep the judgment." → Content Intelligence; article Zettelkasten 2.0.
The whole apparatus by which one person captures, structures, and reuses what they know — vault, rules, skills, publishing. Broader than PKM (note-taking): a system, not a note collection. → Sovereign Personal System · Personal Data Warehouse.
The established field of managing one's own notes and knowledge (Obsidian/Notion/Roam culture). SBM positions as a superset: KM re-architected for AI, one level above the note-taking-tool cohort. → Structure Beats Magic.
The smallest self-contained one-idea unit that recomposes into articles, slides, courses, flashcards. The building block of the second brain. → Play With The Blocks · Content To Training; cf. Zettelkasten, Decompose & Reassemble.
A whole set of documents made machine-readable together, so a model can range over all of it at once instead of one file at a time. → article Your Bookshelf Is Already a Knowledge Base.
An in-process analytical (OLAP) SQL database used as the local, rebuildable view over the file corpus — the query layer beside the vault, never the source of truth. → A Brain That Publishes Itself.
A connection/server that lets the AI query a live source directly rather than being handed pasted data. One of four tools (with prompts, skills, plugins) to reach for deliberately. → article Prompts, Skills, Plugins, MCP.
A procedure written once as a markdown file, invoked as /name, that the AI runs the same way every time — the unit that compounds. → Runbooks; article Skills Are the Unit That Compounds.
A one-off instruction typed in the moment; the right tool only when you'll do the thing once. Past that, promote it to a skill. → Stop Prompting Start Directing.
Handing a model the right retrieved passages to reason over instead of relying on its memory — structure feeding the reasoning. → The Reasoning Layer.
A process safe to re-run: it skips what's already done and never clobbers existing work. What makes an enrichment or import trustworthy to run daily. → The Validation Loop.
A markdown-based note app treated as an interface over a plain-file vault — the app is rented, the files are owned. → Rent The Ai Own The Structure · Document Vault.
An importer lands a source's export into a local table; a connector lets the AI query the live source directly. Two ways to bring a source under structure. → Connect And Dispatch.
An attack that tricks an agent into fetching internal URLs (e.g. cloud metadata) on the attacker's behalf. Why an agent's reach must be governed. → article Governing What Your AI Can Touch.
Malicious instructions hidden in content the AI reads, hijacking its next action. The reason least-privilege matters for agents. → article Governing What Your AI Can Touch.
Granting only the minimum access needed, just in time; deny beats ask beats allow. The guard on an agent's power. → article Governing What Your AI Can Touch.
The field of guiding a group to a shared picture of a contested idea (sketchnoting, graphic facilitation). The neighbouring discipline to Drawing It Together — others' profession; the co-drawing with the business is the part Jaco owns.
Text-based diagram syntax (flowcharts, timelines, Gantt) that markdown tools render into pictures — "text in, picture out". A living diagram: generated from the source, always current. → Living Diagrams.
A sketch/whiteboard tool integrable with an Obsidian vault, turning it into a drawing surface — where drawing it together happens on a personal scale.
A website compiled to plain files at build time (e.g. Astro), served with no runtime server or CMS or database. The mechanism behind a brain that publishes itself. → A Brain That Publishes Itself.
An HTML link that declares the original home of a piece: publish on your own site first, then point syndicated copies (Medium) back to it, so Google credits you. → One Way Publishing.
How value is created, delivered and captured — what you sell and how you get paid (e.g. give the recipe free, sell the kitchen). → Give The Recipe Sell The Kitchen.
How the work actually gets done and handed over — engagement shape, transfer-by-design, who owns the result afterward. Distinct from the business model: how you deliver vs how you charge. → Smart Teams.
The principle that your data model / structure survives every tool that renders it (diagramming app, BI tool, the AI itself). Folded into → Rent The Ai Own The Structure.
A volatile, promotable layer: a term that keeps recurring or earns its own article gets promoted to a concept. The coined concepts live in the concept library.