[drupal-devel] A Folksonomy module

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Morbus Iff wrote:

> > The whole point of folksonomy is that users make up their own tags.
>
> Quite so. But, I'm more concerned with duplicate data (a technical
> implementation) and how it should, or shouldn't, affect "users making up
> their own tags" (an, arguably, UI implementation). If one user creates
> "cat" and another user creates "cat", aren't they the same thing? Why
> should there be two unique tags (and thus tids, RSS feeds, etc.)? Is
> this going to make equivalency code more difficult? If there are two
> different vocabs, and one user says that "feline" is a "synonym" of
> "cat", is that information that we want to throw away for every other
> user, simply because they didn't care or know to create the same
> (arguably correct in this innocent example) association? And, if not,
> why should I need to do a join on the user table?

I think it really depends on the use case what you want. if you have a
large anonymous site, users will want their own tags. If you have a
community site, users are more likely to want to share their tags.

> Does /no one else/ want any sort of "similar keywords" UI, per the UI at
> http://disobey.com/d/2005/similar_keywords.jpg? If yes, then would similar

I do want it. :)

> keywords be across all folksonomy vocabs, or just an individual user? If

I would only use one vocab for all users. But that is for my current use
case.

> there are 1000 users and each user creates 100 terms in their vocab, with
> a perfect match of (even) 10%, aren't we wasting a lot of resources
> storing those duplicates? (Note: I suck at math. I have no clue if that
> calculation makes some sort of scary figure. But, uh, I meant it to <g>).

Terms don't take much space.

> > Otherwise, you have one central vocab like today. At first blush, it
> > seems you want taxonomy on the fly where users add terms to the central
>
> Correct, but an additional table (whether it be new or profile.module)
> would associate uids to tids.

I used to do that for groups.module. ;)

> I'm having a tough time comprehending or
> believing that:
>
>   * technorati is creating $copies amount of terms called "funny", as
>     opposed to just storing one instance of it and uid joining.
>
>   * that my innocent gamegrene site, with two controlled vocabs, is
>     suddenly going to blossom into 900+ vocabs that I have absolutely
>     no control over, nor can ever delete.

What kind of control would you need or want to have? As long as they are
not clogging your /admin/taxo page (which private vocabs do not) I do not
see a problem.

>   * that the NHPR site, with 7000 unique terms, is going to store
>     at least 10 times that many (I'd say there are about 80 users/
>     reporters/ submitters, all who use about 3-10 tags per entry)
>     in your current proposal/design.

For that type of site sharing terms makes probably more sense.

Cheers,
	Gerhard