Dataview Without Obsidian?

[lzilioli]

Dataview is incredibly powerful, and I would love to be able to use it against any markdown lake, even without an instance of obsidian running (and even if it is not an obsidian vault).

I realize that dataview relies heavily on obsidian's cached metadata, but I am curious if there has been discussion or other projects related to "freeing" dataview to run outside of obsidian and on any directory containing markdown files.

[dstengle]

I'd love this, too! I've thought of porting this to Foam a number of times. There is the https://github.com/datopian/markdowndb which is attempting to be able to extract data in a similar way to dataview but without depending on obsidian.

[lzilioli]

I have a project of my own that parses a lot of metadata out of markdown files, but it doesn't follow any standard format, and there's no notion of querying. I built it without knowing about obsidian's metadata cache, or data view. I'm also not super proud of the code, but its unit tested. I use markdown ast for some but not all of my parsing. I use it for my personal website and it handles my basic use case. I've tried it against my obsidian vault and it works, but it's a bit of slower than I'd like and it probably doesn't parse perfectly, but here it is:

https://github.com/lzilioli/md-macros

One way or another I really want to be able to resolve dataview syntax queries against markdown notes outside of an obsidian vault. The fact that you never have to write a JOIN is just really fantastic, lol

markdown-db looks interesting I will have to take a look at that. Thanks for sharing!