At the top of the Person.md is what's called the the frontmatter. If you're not technical, don't let it scare you. It's just a bunch of fields like in a form. In this case, it's the information about the person.
Having structured metadata -- data about the data which, in this case, is data about the person -- is helpful to be able to query across all of your notes and to be able to answer questions like "Who in my network knows Java?"
Frontmatter is a collection of fields at the top of a note delineated by three dashes ---
before and after the fields like this:
---
tags: [person, friend, ex-colleague, blist]
first_name: SpongeBob
last_name: SquarePants
---
Here are the fields in the top of the Person.md template:
Field | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
tags |
Individual labels. Always include person preferably the first one but doesn't have to be |
software-developer , friend , ex-colleague |
subject-id |
Don't use this as it will be removed as it was for me to reference my HAL system, you don't need it | |
aliases |
Nickname or preferred name. Can then link to the person with this alias. See the Obsidian Aliases Help page | [SpongeBob, Bob] |
slug |
A one-word or hyphenated label unique to that person. Must be unique. Used for their folder name under People folder. Used in people: fields in other files like Chat.md or from: or to: in Email.md. Helpful for queries. |
spongebob |
birthday |
One of the most important fields!\nFormat: YYYY-MM-DD or "MM-DD" if you don't know the year.\nTo use the month and day only, you may need to switch to source mode in Obsidian otherwise the date-picker expects a fully qualified date |
1965-09-29 or 09-29 |
title |
Their current job title. Thinking to remove this since already under ## Positions with label #current |
Fry Cook |
skills |
A comma-separated list of one-word or hyphenated words skills the person has. | [java, spring-boot, css] |
organizations |
A collection of organizations. The current organization(s) they are at. Matches slug in the corresponding Organization.md` note file on the company the person is affiliated with |
[krusty-krab, mcdondalds] |
url |
The primary Web site to visit for this person if they have one | https://www.spongebob.com |
products |
A comma-separated list of product slugs that the person worked on. Could be redundant if also in ## Products so may be removed |
[obsidian, dynalist] |
hometown |
Where they are originally from | Bikini Bottom, Marshall Islands |
city |
City where they live | Bikini Bottom |
state |
Province or State where they live | Marshall Islands |
x_id |
The last portion of their X (Twitter) social network URL. Could be redundant if also in ## References so may be removed |
spongebob |
linkedin_id |
The last portion of their LinkedIn social network URL. Could be redundant if also in ## References so may be removed |
spongebobrocks |
For some people I add fields:
anniversary
for their wedding anniversary. Seebirthday
for the formataddress
for their street addresszip
for the postal/ZIP codegithub_id
,threads_id
,reddit_id
etc.
See The Body to learn about the structure of the rest of the person.md
template.