[drupal-devel] A Folksonomy module

[Dries Buytaert]

Julian Bond wrote:
> The trick is clearly to get down to a small enough subset (say 30-50). 
> Some approaches.
> - top 30 of my tags
> - top 30 all tags
> - top 30 tags related to the tags already there. This obviously works 
> best in edit rather than add. The google suggest approach would be to 
> have a 30 most likely in a box below the field and have that box update 
> as the user types in entries. nutr.icio.us and the latest del.icio.us 
> bookmarklet give guidance here. This is icing on the cake, but something 
> to drive convergence and consistent tagging is important.

At the usability sprint we talked about introducing a form_ function 
which adds support for 'Google suggest'-style textfields.  We felt it 
was useful for the various username textfields.  Folksonomy might be 
another use case.

Anyway, integrating folksonomy support in the existing taxonomy 
framework would be very powerful.  Being able to combine 'strict 
vocabularies' and folksonomies has the potential of being a killer feature.

We could do advanced queries like retrieve all forum topics in the 'News 
and announcement' forum (i.e. a term in a 'strict vocabulary') that have 
been tagged with the word 'Ecademy' or 'SpreadFirefox' (i.e. folksonomy 
tags).  Or, a second example, retrieve all forum topics with the 
'image.module' term regardless the fact whether 'image.module' is a 
fixed term as we know it, or a folksonomy tag.  Or, for your particular 
use case, return me all 'IT jobs' (a fixed taxonomy term) in the 'Bay 
area' (a fixed taxonomy term) which have been tagged with either 'CMS' 
or 'Fortune 500' (two folksonomy terms).

While I haven't given the implementation much thought, in my mind, 
folksonomies are a natural extension of the taxonomy module.  It is a 
special kind of vocabulary that shares the underlying data structures 
(terms) with the conventional taxonomy system.

-- 
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/