Topics now have dates

Eric Walker, September 1, 2019

Something I learned from using Digraph for a few months that didn’t occur to me when I started out is that some of the topics that I want to track are situated in time:

In order to capture this dimension of time, I adopted a convention of adding prefixes to some topic names to capture the approximate date. A nice thing about this convention is that the topics with date prefixes sort chronologically, providing a rough timeline.

Eventually I’d like to be able to reconstruct timelines with more precision, and this will require keeping track of the actual dates involved. As a first step, I’ve added a new set of form fields to the topic edit form:

Following are some time-related features that I’d like to add at some point:

Producing a timeline of events that are relevant to a specific search or topic
Keeping track of specific events with a start and an end date
Keeping track of a series of related events that occur over months or years
Keeping track of historical periods that span thousands of years
Keeping track of geological periods that span millions of years
The ability to answer the question of which time-related topics overlap with a specific date, together with the links associated with them