Cognatio is a play on old words.
Long ago as a child, I tried to put all the world's knowledge into a 3-ring binder. Hand-written journal pages, church service programs, pamphlets from school, and diverse other scraps wound up there. This went smoothly until a small problem brought me up short: how to retrieve information? It's useless to store knowledge if it can not be found when needed. At first I gave this simple problem a simple solution - I alphabetized the documents within. But that just led to another problem as the name of the document becomes key. What to use? The first character? What about titles starting with 'The'? This stumped me. Eventually I realized the futility of it all and abandoned the project.
But the ghost of this 3-ring binder has followed me my whole life, lurking in stacks of books and shelves of old journals. It even jumped to digital alongside my own mind back in 2017. So much of what I've learned of the world and recorded is now lost to me. Even references to books, papers, and other guides are broadly unpreserved. To this day I can not rediscover the name of my original Machine Design textbook as the physical book, electronic copy, and class syllabus are all lost.
This is my solution: a new system for notes with just a little software to help it along. This system itself is the most important thing and could just as easily be done with paper if careful bookkeeping accompanied it. However, the nuts and bolts of recording connections between ideas is the perfect application of a database. The internet makes it accessible from anywhere. And code lets it be dynamic, available, and encrypted as needed.
This is my library. I conceived the idea some time ago but now both neccessity and time coincide.