Metadata & Taxonomy Improvements

I’m beginning to organise my cards with more tags, now that I’m finding my workflow with SuperNotes.

I’m finding that I’m trying to build a taxonomy through tags, and was wondering if you have thoughts in place for how to elaborate on the current system?

A few things I’ve noticed myself doing:

  • Using iconography / emojis on tags, such as “:open_book: Book”. Are there plans to integrate the icon support already in SuperNotes to tags?

  • Namespacing Tags, such as “Programming Language/Rust”. The more of these I add, the more cluttered my cards are getting. Perhaps some special handling of prefixes could be made?

A page for renaming and managing tags would be great too, currently it isn’t possible to rename a tag (AFAICT)

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Specifically chiming in to say that prefixed/namespaced tags would be amazing.

I’m constantly worried about my tag space blowing up and trying to keep it groomed and minimal — all of those concerns go away if namespaces/prefixes are added, since you can throw a bunch of semantic tags into a namespace with little risk of conflict or confusion.

@tekacs mentioned in another post about using front matter for structured metadata and I’ve been going through my cards trying to understand how this would work in my personal workflow and I think it would be great!

Reminders (Single Use & Recurring)

I’m using a modified “PARA” method, in that I have an “Areas” card.

Inside Cards there are cards for Companies, People, and Topics.

Inside people I have people cards. Currently I’m using plain text with links to companies to indicate whom they work for.

This works well with back links.

However, if we could structure this; queries across cards could become much more powerful.

Example:

Name: David McKay
Employer: [Some Company](^ID)
DOB: !01/01/1950
Links:
- [Twitter](Https...)
---

Normal card data for this person
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This is great. I have this exact use-case myself (as a sort of CRM) and I would love to use frontmatter instead of free text.

At the moment my cards start with ‘Met through [Person Name](^...)’ and so on.

Front matter would solve this well. I’ve also written against the API and am maintaining a separate (external) mapping of UUID -> metadata, but I’d prefer the metadata to live in Supernotes.

Structured metadata is actually a planned feature, which I guess I need to prioritize now :sweat_smile:

It is also how we are planning to implement manual sorting. The original plan wasn’t necessarily to expose such metadata directly to users, but I can see how it makes sense to be able to edit and add whatever you want to the meta.

That being said, we probably won’t be implementing it as part of the markdown content in the form of frontmatter, as we are moving away from raw markdown as the underlying storage format.

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Oh that’s interesting — really curious to hear what sort of thing that might be, especially during the building of an API client.

I wonder when custom metadata would be added, probably after offline support?

Just chiming in to +1 custom metadata and manual sort-order. Both these features would be a major boon for certain use cases and card sets. I similarly have notes on books and such and like to occasionally note down a page that’s associated with a card. Currently I need to do this by writing the literal string p<n>. It’d be great to be able to tuck this away in metadata so that I can reference it only when needed.

This will be coming in Custom Collections, which will be introduced as part of Supernotes 3.1

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