While the Taxonomy module looks very powerful, I'm not sure
how practical it will be for our site. I've seen attempts at creating
taxonomy driven knowledge bases fail miserably in corporate settings, because of
the difficulty in creating a meaningful taxonomy (the most successful
implementations usually delegate this task to a knowledge management
professional), and because of unwillingness of content contributors to learn the
taxonomy and apply it to their content. And that's in an environment where
it's someone's job to manage and contribute to the site.
Social software like Wikis and Folksonomies succeed because
they allow the content and tagging to happen more organically. Linking is
a case in point. One of the defining characteristics of wikis is the
automatic link handling. To create a link, you just have to type a
CamelCase phrase, or surround a phrase with some delimiter (usually
[[...]]). If a page with a matching title already exists, a link is
automatically created. If the page title is changed, the links are
automatically updated. If a matching page doesn't exist, it will be
automatically created when the link is clicked. All very simple, and
easily picked up by users.
Contrast this with traditional web page linking (as
implemented by default in Drupal):
-
Add some text
-
Select the text
-
Open a hyperlink dialog
-
Type in a well formed URL (often requiring that you navigate to the
target page and copy and paste the URL from the address
bar)
Four steps vs. the single step of typing a CamelCase
phrase. And, if the target page is renamed, the link will break (although,
to be fair, Wikis are not totally immune to broken links, but they do make it
simpler to avoid them). That's why I think we need to implement the
Freelinking module for Drupal, to get Wiki-style linking.
Although I haven't seen the Taxonomy module in action, I'm
concerned about the overhead of building and maintaining a taxonomy, and the
difficulty in getting users to tag their pages. I'm happy to be convinced
otherwise.
Regards,
Jerry
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
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
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
