[drupal-devel] A Folksonomy module

[Moshe Weitzman]

Julian Bond wrote:
> Last year there was a post here suggesting a "system" type of taxonomy 
> vocabulary that would use the taxonomy tables but provide no user 
> interface.

I reently decided to reimplement folksonomy using system vocabularies. 
As mentioned, these are successfully being used for image galleries in 
the upcoming image.module and already being used for forum.module in 
4.6. My thought was to create a vocabulary for each user. The vocab 
would be created the first time the user tagged an item. That way, we 
don't unnecessarily create vocabs for every single user ... One 
disadvantage about this approach is that you will only be able to tag 
nodes. So the noption of tagging users would be gone (without reworking 
taxonomy). One nice application of tagging users is in buddylists where 
a given user can be a member of 'work', 'friends', etc. Think IM buddy 
list groups ... But overall, thats my thinking.

> 
> I've been looking at a similar idea to re-use the taxonomy module for a 
> folksonomy. It looks to me like almost every function in taxonomy would 
> have to be modified or replaced. And I don't think taxonomy would cope 
> well with the target of 1000 tags in a folksonomy vocabulary.
>

do you have evidence for this claim?

> So where I'm going now is to extend Moshe's folksonomy.module and 
> progressively add cut, paste and modify versions of the taxo 
> administrative function, to provide utility functions, but not to 
> include any user interface. This to stay in what I think is Moshe's 
> original intent which is to support other modules that provide 
> innovative UI to the data.

I am hoping to duplicate very little of taxo functions. Not sure what 
you are up to here. But yes, some management pages are helpful for tags.

> 
> Right now I've got 3 tables.
> - folksonomy       // tag node links
> - folksonomy_realm // corresponds to vocabulary
> - folksonomy_realm_node_types // corresponds to vocabulary_node_types

with system vocabs, you don't make your own tables. thats my goal. i'm 
not doing much to get there though. perhaps juklian and others want to 
move this along.