Taxonomy construction using WordNet?

I'm not sure I completely follow how you plan to map these concepts to Drupal (are words taxonomy terms, and links between them related terms?) or in fact quite what workflow you envision, but here are a lot of projects and issues in a similar space you might want to check out:

• http://drupal.org/project/lexicon
• online dictionary allowing users to add words proposal (not implemented)
• Synonymy should be mutually symmetric bug report
• Smart Tags – A proposal for an intelligent tagging mechanism in Drupal
• Universal Pantograph points to an article on Visualizing WordNet and in fact is building a Drupal subject map module
• You may also want to check out http://drupal.org/project/kasahorow - a Drupal 4.7 module that includes a kdictionary module with some WordNet capabilities (according to commit logs).

Feel free to create a Wiki page if you want to track resources and planned features for your project in public here in the taxonomy group!

^{benjamin, Agaric Design Collective}

Thank you for your response and for all the links, Benjamin =) In fact, the Smart Tags is similar in some way to this WordNet module. It, doesn't any auxiliary dictionary, but it also tries to solve some of the problems with free tagging.

Let me try to explain a little bit better what I would like to do. I will give you an expample. Imagine there is a web page based in Drupal about food receipes and dishes. The module will work as follows:

1) Bob adds a receipe of a Beef Sandwich, and tags it with the words "beef" and "sandwich".
2) The module goes to WordNet, checks the hypernym relations for both words.
3) A list of possible categories for those word is showed to Bob, and he is asked if he thinks his tags are in those categories:

Beef:
- Longhorn
- Santa Gertrudis
- Angus
- Meat

Sandwhich:
- Snack Food

4) Bob selects "Meat" and "Snack Food"
5) The taxonomy is updated with this information

There are various interesting points here:

• In step 3, the module will not only check WordNet, but also the existing taxonomy. If those tags are already part of the taxonomy, they might be shown first in the list, in bold letters or something.
• The module might also show the user a list of synonyms for some of the tags he introduced. An example of this will be with plurals: if the user tags something as "Onions", the module will show him a message: "Perhaps you wanted to use Onion instead of Onions. Try to avoid plurals. Thank you" and let him validate it. Or even better, just change the tag automatically from "Onions" to "Onion". You can do this easily with WordNet.
• Perhaps different users select different categories for the same tag. What will happen then? Well, I don't know yet. I have thought about keeping a list of the diferent options chosen by users and their popularity, and just use in the taxonomy the most popular option.

Well, I hope everyone can undestand better what is in my mind. As I said before, any kind of help is very welcomed! :)

Best regards,
Ángel.-

I understand a lot more clearly now!

With hook_nodeapi on the operation 'validate' you ought to be able to catch and look at the vocabulary, or probably use that as a failsafe (now that I think of it that seems hackish, better approach anyone?) and use an AJAX 'fetch from WordNet' button to grab the information. If you just use free tagging (add more terms from WordNet but without hierarchy) all you have to do is add them to the taxonomy array that is submitted. To create hierarchical terms on the fly you need to do some more but it's possible, I know I did it for (still alpha) community managed taxonomy.

^{benjamin, Agaric Design Collective}