[drupal-devel] Taxonomy Similar: Very Early First Draft

[Morbus Iff]

Hey all. Anyone interested in my tagging patch has probably seen:

  http://disobey.com/detergent/2005/similar_keywords.jpg

which is/was a homebrew UI to select similar tags to the ones entered 
during content creation. I've just finished an early draft for Drupal:

  http://disobey.com/detergent/2005/drupal_taxonomy_similar.jpg
  cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/taxonomy_similar/

Some notes:

  * the low match count is because I've only imported 8000 terms,
    and not all the node content that exists at NHPR.org. I'll be
    populating term_node soon so I can get an idea of the hit on
    tag->node counting.

  * the module works best when you already have a large tagging
    vocabulary. It'll probably be pretty useless if you have less
    than, say, 500 terms.

  * there's no help, README, blah - hell, there's not much of anything
    in the way of documentation besides that screenshot. Still, the
    code DOES work (and the next version will redirect you to
    node/$nid instead of itself after submission).

  * it will ONLY kick in on free-tagging vocabularies. there is no
    configuration necessary. install it, enable it, insert/update
    a node that uses free tagging.

I got into some small discussion about the UI today, and I wanted to 
rationalize why I've done it the way I've done it. The current UI supports 
ALL these possibilities, and I've yet to find a compact or intuitive 
alternative based on other folks suggestions.

  * don't change a thing (close the window, or "submit").
  * re-assign tags (uncheck your original, check new one).
  * add tags (keep your original checked, check new one).
  * delete tags (uncheck your original, don't check new one).

I have plans on the following explorations:

  * Explore "merging" of tags, such that two similar tags can be merged
    into one combined tag. this would be an 'administer taxonomy' access.

  * Explore playing with term_relation so that similar tags are
    related to one another when a user makes that explicit choice.

  * Explore a 'view nodes' sorta screen or block, which would just link off
    to similar keywords. this seems evilly dangerous, since the similarity
    code is prohibitive to run on a large vocab (8000+ tested).

  * Currently, there's a bit of confusion when it comes to "your tags" that
    are also "similar tags" for another one. So, say you choose "Death
    Penalty". A similar tag is "Juvenile Death Penalty", so you also choose
    that one. The NEXT time you go back to that screen, should "Juvenile
    Death Penalty" (now one of "your tags") still be shown as a similar
    tag under "Death Penalty"? From a clutter standpoint, no. From a
    comprehension/expectation standpoint, I'm not sure.

Anyways.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( you are nothing without your robot car, NOTHING! )
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
Spidering Hacks: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005776/disobeycom
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