Mentions of people in org file?

Question

Is there some way in org-mode to keep track of people mentioned in an outline?

Sometimes I use an @ in front of a person's handle to keep a note of who was the source of a piece of information, or who to ask about a particular question, or even who is responsible for a delegated TODO. This personal syntax looks like this:

* Earth orbits Sun
This was originally proposed by @copernicus.
* TODO ask @galileo about this
* TODO @newton works on an alternative formulation

I can then search for those specific strings in the file or the whole folder. I could use tags for the same, but then I could not use them in body text, only on headings, and only at the end of the sentence ... Also, I feel like a tag should represent a cross-hierarchy category for a heading, but not specifically a person.

The things I am missing with my ad-hoc solution are:

1. org agenda functions to filter only tasks that mention specific people, or that mention people at all,
2. maybe some type of columnar view that shows all people mentioned in a larger body of text

Does anyone know if there is an org-mode syntax for this that I may have overlooked, or else a package that provides this functionality?

Answer 1

I use https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/blob/master/org-db.el for something like this. It doesn't directly support your syntax.

I have toyed with storing hashtags (which is pretty similar), with mixed success. There are a lot of false positives especially with org-mode and src-blocks. I added support for @labels, and if it goes well in the next few days, I will probably commit it to the link above.

I have used a contact link as suggested in the comment above, and there is an org-db-links command for finding them.