This will be a miniseries so I’ll give it its own thread.
Keywords for search: 0198
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JD - I look forward to your elaboration of this. I’ve been wrestling with the same thing (also in context with research notes I make from scientific papers - the academic problem, and teaching ideas). I’ve been bouncing in and out of Obsidian for this use - had been looking at Capacities and Anytype (not really used Airtable).
The advantage of Capacities and Anytype over Obsidian is that they also introduce the notion of object type, which may be useful, and that changes in adding or subtracting properties from object types propagate through all instantiations of objects created with that type. This is something not easily done in Obsidian. But importing and exporting from Capacities (which is somewhat more mature than Anytype, IMHO) is still a bit rough.
I tag everything with idea tags.
I use the ID codes from Roget’s Thesaurus. What else is supposed to organize ideas other than a semantic repository of them? 
My format for annotating a bit of work I’m doing is to write the sequence of second order (not first order, the reason for this is quite complex but it helps keep the ideas cloud meaningful as opposed to obvious) idea transformations I had to do to produce a work.
As a concrete example: If I’m designing a business card and I realize the font of the business card being professional then allows me to have a playful colour, and a playful colour allows me to stick out in a pile of business cards in someone’s pocket, I would then say “What’s happened here is limited formality gave the way to a license to play and a license to play gave me the ability to be noticeable.” Translating these key words into the-saurus then gives me Limit at 233 permits ~836 cheerfulness which itself enables ~457 attention. And I’d tag 233> and >457. In my ideas cloud I can then have a vector space of outgoings from 233, incomings to 457, and all intermediary routes, say I otherwise find a route that goes 233> >218 and a different note labeled 218> to >457 I would now have 5 paths to investigate the strategic path of every time I want to garner attention (direct, indirect, direct combined with either indirect first order steps, indirect combined with direct first order steps). The incompleteness of the cloud allows higher quality thoughts to be in the cloud, and as the cloud fills out only non-obvious creative directions can be followed up on.
Finally … Roget’s Thesaurus is numbered. So files that help me maintain my concepts (pictures, diagrams, philosophical project files to help me grapple with an idea like love) all get their own JD.ID at 00.00 to 09.99.
Fascinating idea to use Roget’s. Do you have an actual copy or is there a decent online version?
I’d thought that it might be cool for a public-tag-hierarchy-as-wiki to exist, but if one already does, well. I’ll check it out.
Edit: checked it out. The problem there might be that it’s a little too ‘ephemeral concept’. There’s no entry for, say, pencil. Or Valencia.
I’m liking imaginarium as a name for this.
What I wanted to say first up, and what @clappingcactus post underscores somewhat, is that tagging is a continuous tense verb. I.e., tagging is an ongoing process, hard work, continuously under revision, is the work itself. Maybe just like “if I write down a reminder I find I don’t need the reminder”, the ongoing wrestling with the tags gives you understanding and memory.
Fuzzy search over concepts is I think a good stand in for ideas. Proper nouns like people and places are not ideas. They are where ideas happen. I’m happy in my travel folder to have an idea I have had about Valencia or its history without necessarily having to keep up with why Valencia specifically gave rise to the idea.
But that’s because I’m a researcher and I’m more interested in the “how” rather than the “what”.
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Another thing to think about is the criteria for when a cluster of ideas in the imaginarium presents itself as sufficient to be organized in a new project in your JDEX - 1) how to determine and 2) what are (relatively) frictionless workflows?
Yeah the hand-off point is definitely interesting. I just caught myself doing it then – is an idea for a YouTube video one I’m going to do this week? If so, it can stay in my task manager.
But if not – and you must be ruthless in this decision – it’s just an idea. It is not a task and if you put it in your task management system it’s noise.
That’s the stuff that I now chuck over to the Imaginarium. Maybe I’ll get to it. Maybe I won’t, because I have 30 ideas a day and it’s impossible to do them all.
I think then, to use David Allen’s GTD terminology, the Imaginarium is sort of a “someday/never” repository that should periodically be harvested or culled.
It is, but it’s also a repository of made things such that I can link them together with tags.
Crucially, none of those things may have an action assigned. It’s pure linked-historical-record. A pool of stuff that you can dive into and explore.
Like @phillychuck I’m interested in this is an academic problem. I struggle with how to integrate my zettlekasten with my jDex. My jDex stores active and completed writing projects and courses. But I am constantly reading and taking notes on literature in my field more broadly that might be incorporated into future projects/course revisions but doesn’t have a clear, id-level purpose yet. I definitely don’t want to use airtable for this but I go back and forth between a separate obsidian vault for my zettel and integrating it into my JD system so I can more freely link to writing & courses. Am about to explore Roget’s thesaurus for a possible tagging structure that might help! Zettlekasten feels like the right name for me: it’s a box of semi structured notes with linking notes between them. Obsidian is perfect for this.
Have a look at Curio from Zengobi. It definitely allowed me to not let the software get in the way and chase my concepts more organically. It allowed me to create all sorts of support frames around my ideas ie links, tags, media, drawings etc.
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