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

[Julian Bond]

Morbus Iff <morbus at disobey.com> Fri, 8 Apr 2005 07:52:07
>> said "Explore playing with term_relation so that similar tags are 
>>related to one another". In the above example, I don't see how you can 
>>draw any conclusions about horses being equivalent to horseriding.
>>
>> I guess I'm puzzled by the algorithm you're using to define what is 
>>an  alternate term (synonym?) as opposed to being a related term.
>
>There is none. My relations only occur at the behest
>of humans. There is no automated relation creation.

ooohh-kaaay. So just so I understand, the user puts in xxx, yyy, zzz as 
terms. You do a similar_text and metaphone analysis on each and say xxx 
is 81% like xxxA that somebody else used on another node. Would you like 
to use that instead? And you're doing this on the fly rather than 
storing the results anywhere, such as {term_synonym}.

Is that right?

I have to confess that I find related terms more interesting than trying 
to get people to tag better. There's been quite a lot of discussion on 
the Flickr and del.icio.us developer forums about using things like 
porter-stemming and soundex to converge synonym use and make tagging 
"better". Consensus so far seems to be that it's not really worth the 
effort and doesn't necessarily help. But at the same time, the UI at 
data entry is getting better as we find ways of suggesting appropriate 
tag/terms. This one is impressive.
http://ejohn.org/projects/autodelicious/
Firefox + greasemonkey + Javascript + del.icio.us beta bookmarklet = 
auto-suggest terms in the edit field using AJAX. Wow!

We're all still feeling our way with this stuff.

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