A Knowledge Base is a Map
What is the difference between a Diagram and a Map?
Simon Wardley rightly pointed out that Graphs and Diagrams are quite distinct from Maps. What is the difference?
The difference is that Maps are embedded in space, sometimes a 2-dim space, sometimes a higher-dim space. Or even in a non-metric space, such as a topological space.
Wardley uses a 2-dim space with axes time (evolution) and visibility (value chain), to define what he calls a landscape as in Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
@NickMilo suggests dimensions like space, time, importance, and relatedness (STIR)
AI embeddings use billion-dimensional spaces to embed vectorized tokens and sequences.
Niklas Luhmann didn't use the word Map, but his numbering system for identifying slip boxes is a kind of Map, albeit not a Euclidean space. His numbering defines categories and subcategories, and sequences (i.e. time). His numbering system defines a tree with a distance.
In all Maps, the placement is always crucial, items can not be placed arbitrarily, they are always placed with respect to the coordinates and in relation to other items.
A digital Zettelkasten that does not use Luhmann's numbering system, must have something else to substitute for it. The Knowledge Base must always have a sense of a landscape. If you don't like the war terrain metaphor, think of it as a garden landscape.
A Knowledge Base that is too large and not well organized is simply useless Chaos.
On the other hand, if placements are correctly done, we can derive notions like proximity or distance, clusters of ideas, and movements or paths of progressions.
Relationships are easily identified, and what matters most, we gain new perspectives resulting in new ideas.