OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   RE: [dita-fa-edboard] Book versus Story

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]

Greg,
This sounds exactly like what we want. Thank you so much for the information. I think the Ed Board should try to test this process on one of the pages with our own content. I propose seeding an area with a position paper and asking the others to add comments and categorize them. Do we have to set up the vocabulary in advance?
 

JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD
President
Comtech Services, Inc.
710 Kipling Street, Suite 400
Denver CO 80215
303-232-7586
joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com

 

 


From: Greg Rundlett [mailto:greg.rundlett@oasis-open.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 11:01 PM
Cc: JoAnn Hackos; Jerry Silver; Carol Geyer; dita-fa-edboard@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [dita-fa-edboard] Book versus Story

My apologies in advance because I have not had a chance to read this complete thread, I may be responding to a perceived issue while missing particular inputs by Ed. board members.

I like wikis.

I have used them since the dawn of wiki.

Wikis are good, and I would say that Drupal is a (wiki-like) collaborative authoring environment out of the box without any added wiki modules.  We can and will be adding wiki modules to the DITA.xml.org site.  I have already started implementing the FreeLinking module that lets you add CamelCase links in your content.  At the same time, I think we may be missing the wiki-ness of Drupal regardless of whether we implement more wiki-related feature modules like FreeLinking. 

I just want to point out that a major feature of Drupal is it's capability to organize content around categories (called taxonomies[1][2]) and offers easy ways of navigating those categories including the individual terms, aggregation of terms and subsets of terms within the vocabularies.

So, lets say for argument there is a vocabulary around 'conformance' with terms like 'tool', 'testing', 'validation', 'level'.  Then members create 20 pages of content about conformance.  They (or an editor) can tag each page with the appropriate terms.  The site can offer a 'conformance' page that lists automatically the most recent pages on the topic, with links to sub-topics etc.  This way the site is both wiki-like in that it is easy to create content; and it is UN-wiki-like in that it is easy to navigate content automatically in ways that weren't even envisioned at the time an article is written.

[1] Taxonomy module (Drupal core) http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy
[2] Taxonomy admin guide from site /admin/help/taxonomy

taxonomy

Background

Taxonomy is the study of classification. Drupal's taxonomy module allows you to define vocabularies which are used to classify content. The module supports hierarchical classification and association between terms, allowing for truly flexible information retrieval and classification. For more details about classification types and insight into the development of the taxonomy module, see this drupal.org discussion.

An example taxonomy: food

  • Dairy
    • Milk
  • Drink
    • Alcohol
      • Beer
      • Wine
    • Pop
    • Milk
  • Meat
    • Beef
    • Chicken
    • Lamb
  • Spices
    • Sugar

Notes

  • The term Milk appears within both Dairy and Drink. This is an example of multiple parents for a term.
  • In Drupal the order of siblings (e.g. Beef, Chicken, Lamb) in a vocabulary may be controlled with the weight parameter.

Vocabularies

When you create a controlled vocabulary you are creating a set of terms to use for describing content (known as descriptors in indexing lingo). Drupal allows you to describe each piece of content (blog, story, etc.) using one or many of these terms. For simple implementations, you might create a set of categories without subcategories, similar to Slashdot's sections. For more complex implementations, you might create a hierarchical list of categories such as Food taxonomy shown above.

Setting up a vocabulary

When setting up a controlled vocabulary, if you select the hierarchy option, you will be defining a tree structure of terms, as in a thesaurus. If you select the related terms option, you are allowing the definition of related terms (think see also), as in a thesaurus. Selecting multiple select will allow you to describe a piece of content using more than one term. That content will then appear on each term's page, increasing the chance that a user will find it.

When setting up a controlled vocabulary you are asked for:

  • Vocabulary name: The name for this vocabulary. Example: Dairy.
  • Description: Description of the vocabulary. This can be used by modules and feeds.
  • Types: The list of content types you want to associate this vocabulary with. Some available types are blog, book, forum, page, and story.
  • Related terms: Allows relationships between terms within this vocabulary. Think of these as see also references.
  • Hierarchy: Allows a tree-like vocabulary, as in our Foods example above.
  • Multiple select: Allows pieces of content to be described using more than one term. Content may then appear on multiple taxonomy pages.
  • Required: If selected, each piece of content must have a term in this vocabulary associated with it.
  • Weight: The overall weight for this vocabulary in listings with multiple vocabularies.

Adding terms to a vocabulary

Once done defining the vocabulary, you have to add terms to it to make it useful. The options you see when adding a term to a vocabulary will depend on what you selected for related terms, hierarchy and multiple select. These options are:

  • Term name: The name for this term. Example: Milk.
  • Description: Description of the term that may be used by modules and feeds. This is synonymous with a "scope note".
  • Parent: Select the term under which this term is a subset -- the branch of the hierarchy that this term belongs under. This is also known as the "Broader term" indicator used in thesauri.
  • Synonyms: Enter synonyms for this term, one synonym per line. Synonyms can be used for variant spellings, acronyms, and other terms that have the same meaning as the added term, but which are not explicitly listed in this vocabulary (i.e. unauthorized terms).
  • Weight: The weight is used to sort the terms of this vocabulary.

Displaying content organized by terms

In order to view the content associated with a term or a collection of terms, you should browse to a properly formed Taxonomy URL. For example, taxonomy/term/1+2. Taxonomy URLs always contain one or more term IDs at the end of the URL. You may learn the term ID for a given term by hovering over that term in the taxonomy overview page and noting the number at the end or the URL. To build a Taxonomy URL start with "taxonomy/term/". Then list the term IDs, separated by "+" to choose content tagged with any of the given term IDs, or separated by "," to choose content tagged with all of the given term IDs. In other words, "+" is less specific than ",". Finally, you may optionally specify a "depth" in the vocabulary hierarchy. This defaults to "0", which means only the explicitly listed terms are searched. A positive number indicates the number of additional levels of the tree to search. You may also use the value "all", which means that all descendant terms are searched.

RSS feeds

Every term, or collection of terms, provides an RSS feed to which interested users may subscribe. The URL format for a sample RSS feed is taxonomy/term/1+2/0/feed. These are built just like Taxonomy URLs, but are followed by the word "feed".



-- 
Gregory S. Rundlett
Manager
Technology Services
OASIS
"Advancing E-Business Standards Since 1993"
http://www.oasis-open.org
(978) 667-5115 x 205




 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS