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Fundamentals
Objects, Types, Relations, and Sets
This page is intended to provide a conceptual overview of Anytype's core elements and how they interact with each other.
For concrete examples of how to use the product, we recommend starting with our Use Cases & Tutorials section.
People, Books, Musicians, Documents, Ideas, Places, Numbers, or Files. In Anytype, these are all "Objects". For instance, a person named "Enda," an essay you wrote, a song by "Pink Floyd," the film "2001", a town called "Berlin," or the year 1984.
Everything you create within Anytype is an Object, and Objects are the foundation of your knowledge graph.
While everything is an Object, it helps to differentiate or group these Objects so that we can draw meaningful distinctions between them. That's where Types come in.
In the above schema, Berlin has the Type: Location, and 2001: A Space Odyssey has the Type: Movie - not so different from how we think of 'objects' in the real world. Berlin and Space Odyssey occupy very different spaces in my mind (even though they are both 'Objects' in my Anyverse), because they have different characteristics that make them almost incomparable. One is a city, meanwhile the other is a film.
For this reason, each Object you create in Anytype has a Type, which is always visible in Object view. You can sort your Objects according to whichever Type is most meaningful to you, and you can always add more Types or change an Object's Type post-creation as the Object evolves (for instance, from an Idea to a Project).
When considering all of the Objects in your life (humans, ideas, tasks, projects), you most likely do not envision them as independent modules, but rather as an interconnected web with unique relationships that link them together.
Relations are a tool to help you define the connections that exist between Objects. For example, I have two Objects in my graph: A Book (Sapiens) and a Human (Yuval Noah Harari). These two are connected by the Relation: Author. Yuval Noah Harari is the author of Sapiens.
Now that the Relation between these two Objects has been defined, they are no longer independent entities in my knowledge graph. The more Relations I've created between Objects, the better I'm able to visualize how they are connected.
Read on for a deep dive into Relations and how they work in Practice:
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Sets are a way to filter your Objects according to certain criteria, so you can visualize, organize, and manage them in a single place.
Sets don't store objects like regular databases. Instead, they are a way to see a portion of your knowledge graph that matches the given criteria, for instance: Objects with Type: Task. Once I create a Set with this criteria, any Task Object I've created will be visible to me in a single view.
Read on for a deep dive into Sets and how to use them:
Primary and Profile layouts support either an emoji or a photo icon. All layouts, except Note, support a cover image.
Last modified 4mo ago