Feature request: Allowing meta-information to topics, and then sorting by those

probably generalizable and useful in other cases

Yes I can think of other use cases. In fact, I wrote (a lot) about that a while ago: Adding Tags to Talkyard. If you scroll down, you'll find a design sketch showing how key-values, or tags-with-values, could look. And just below that image, there's this text: "Tags have a name (label) ... and, values?" with thoughts about other use case for key-values / tags-with-values.

I then want something like this: https://../top/category-name/key-name

That would find pages in category Category-Name, that have the property Key-Name?

And sort by key value, e.g. sort by number of citations, if the key is Num-Citations, or by, say, publication date? (I'd think that'd be better expressed in a query param, e.g. ?sortBy=Publication-Year,-Num-Citations if you'd like to sort by two keys)

allow people to talk about research papers

That sounds nice :- )   Can I ask, what motivates you to do that? Do you have in mind to host it yourself (as a single person "hobby project") or host it at the university somehow? (If you want to reply privately, you could send a PM, click my name.)

What are the research papers about b.t.w., any specific field

So could help in adding this feature to the source, if people have some guidance

I think this is not a good first thing to contribute to (instead, it requires pretty deep knowledge about the software, or so I think). But hearing about how you would want key-values to work, and maybe UI design ideas, would be helpful.
(If nevertheless you would want to try, I'd suggest starting initially with some smaller tasks instead.)

I've thought a bit about this, and I might be wrong but I think it should be doable pretty soon to add these types of properties, or tags with values, together with adding API support for inserting tags & listing tags. And then, in a 2nd step later, sorting by property/tag values.

I'm adding database columns for remembering any tag values, in the next version,

here's how the new database columns for storing property/tag values, look right now: (If you have any feedback?)

alter table tags_t
    add column  val_type_c   i16_gz_d,
    add column  val_i32_c    i32_d,
    add column  val_f64_c    f64_d,
    add column  val_str_c    text_nonempty_ste250_trimmed_d,
    add column  val_url_c    http_url_ste_250_d,
    add column  val_jsonb_c  jsonb_ste1000_d,
    add constraint  tags_c_valtype_has_val  check (
        (val_type_c is null)
          = (num_nonnulls(val_i32_c, val_f64_c, val_str_c, val_url_c, val_jsonb_c) = 0)),
    add constraint  tags_c_max_one_val_for_now  check (
        num_nonnulls(val_i32_c, val_f64_c, val_str_c, val_url_c, val_jsonb_c) <= 1),
    add constraint  tags_c_val_is_i32_or_txt_for_now  check (
        num_nonnulls(val_url_c, val_jsonb_c) = 0),
    add constraint  tags_c_valtype_simple_1_for_now  check (
        (val_type_c = 1) or (val_type_c is null));


comment on column  tags_t.val_type_c  is $_$

1 (one) means it's a "simple" value, meaning, it's just what's stored:
if val_i32_c is not null, the value is an integer, if val_f64_c is
not null, it's a decimal value and so on.

Later there might be more complex values, e.g. val_f64_c might be
used to instead store a date (Unix time), or val_f64_c and val_i32_c
to store the start and duration (seconds) of an event.

The url in val_url_c can be combined with any other value, and makes
it a link?  However, disabled for now.

Or if val_type_c is html, then val_str_c would be interpreted as
unsanitized unsafe html. But if val_type_c is simple (1), then it's plain text.

Future plugins can use jsonb to store whatever they want.
Could allow jsonb together with other values too? Could display
a '{}' after any numeric or text value, to indicate that there's json.

For now, urls and jsonb aren't allowed — only numbers and plain text.
$_$; -- '

Any thoughts, things to do differently?

Once these fields have been populated, would like a view that sorts by a given key and shows all the topics in a category.

Could you give some concrete examples of how you would use this?

One example maybe could be: In the Computer Science category, I want to see all papers sorted by publication year? Another could be: Show me all Comp Sci papers sorted by number of citations?

Or am I misunderstanding something :- )   What did you have in mind?

What about queries like: Show all Comp Sci papers from the 1990's, sorted by number of citations?

In this: (from the orig post)

https://../top/category-name/key-name

Could you give some examples of what key-name could be? (And category-name too :- ))

I've made some progress with this. Now it is (in the development version on my laptop) possible to add values to tags, and list tagged topics and filter by value.

For example, this search query: tags:published>=1990,citations>=2,comp-sci some text searches only papers published after 1990 and have at least two citations and have been tagged with comp-sci, for the text "some text".

Later, you'll be able to sort, maybe something like this:

tag:published>1990,citations>=1  sort:tagval:published:asc

So, sort by "tagval" i.e. tag value, of the tag named published, in ascending order.

Using ElasticSearch for all this :- )   (PostgreSQL is nice but doesn't have all advanced search features needed for this)

Ok now everything works, in my work-in-progress branch, including creating pages-with-tags-and-values via the API. ... Now time to write some automatic tests, and code review, will take about a week. I'll publish some API docs too, maybe tomorrow, if you have any feedback.

I suspect that Talkyard will be the first discussion software in the world that supports tags with values :- )

Almost no other software does — one of the few who does, is Kubernetes and their labels key-value pairs (that's not discussion software though). But that's text values only — one can't sort in numerical order or do >=, <= etc comparisons.

I'm going to add a Priority: NNN tag-with-value to this forum, so I can sort by priority, and remember what to do next. Just recently there was something I had forgotten for about 2 years :- /

Now this has finally been implemented, & tested etc. Building a new server, to deploy to Prod in a few days, barring any bugs.

Now this has been implemented (since the end of October) — if you search for: tags:priority:desc>3 you'll find topics tagged with "priority", in descending order, and priority > 3. Would work also for things like tags:publish-year:desc<1995,citations>=2 — finds papers up to year 1995 with at least two citations.

( @karu what did you end up doing? I'm thinking / guessing that in the end you went with some other software, since this took long to implement? (Properties-values / tags-with-values, was in the things-planned-to-do list in any case))

***

It'd be nice if the search results page would show tags & values too. Right now it shows just the topic titles and the text that got "hit". And something like: is:open is needed, if one wants to ignore topics that's been closed / done.