Using D7 to build a Thesaurus for use by > 1 Application/Website

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worldlinemine's picture

An idea I am presently working on is building a simple Drupal site to provide a controlled vocabulary to other Drupal sites as well as non-Drupal applications in D7.

I'm curious if anyone has tried to do something like this at some reasonable scale? How many terms were you able to support? Did you use the Services module to make the terms available for use in other sites? What method of term ingest did you use? Did you include definitions or synonyms? Any additional thoughts or warnings?

Comments

any update

UN Web Services's picture

I think this is a great idea and something I am thinking about. Do you have any updates on your experience with this approach?... thanks !

Brief update.

worldlinemine's picture

A very simple prototype site I've been working with is simply leveraging a combination of two modules and Drupal 7.x:
http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_csv
http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_manager

I'm considering including three more modules to test for improvements and stability of the projects:
http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_revision
http://drupal.org/project/batax
http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_edge

It's important to note that with large and very large taxonomies performance becomes a significant issue for a site:
http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/drupals-big-data-problem

While my long term hope is to leverage services and uuid modules but in my experience there are a lot of challenges and UX issues when managing taxonomies. The benefits to the centralized location is a reduction in effort to maintain a vocabulary and the ability to provide a common set of facets for search. However, there are presently tedious issues such as how to add a new term locally to a site which is not the central source and then push it back to origin.

If my experiment proves useful from a day to day standpoint in maintaining multiple documentation sources which have the potential to leverage the same vocabulary I intend to dig into this issue further.

@pjdnyc, was this update of any usefulness to you?

very useful

UN Web Services's picture

This is really helpful especially given I'm quite new to drupal. In my current role we are using semaphore from smartlogics, from the organisational standpoint taxonomy is seen as something that should be maintained centrally. Individual sitebuilders wouldn't be able to make changes to it. This is probably a different use case to smaller organisations who are less concerned about governance. The taxonomy manager module looks like it will be a great help ... I've noted the 20,000 term limit as a best practice. Any tips on how taxonomy can be locked at the content level so that terms can only be re-used from the term store and not added on the fly? Once again thanks for your insights...

controlling who can update the taxonomy

UN Web Services's picture

so... I am succesfully sharing a single taxonomy between multiple sites which is great for creating a shared vocabulary. However, I don't want all the different sites to be able to update the taxonomy tables? Any thoughts how I can implement this? IE so that only the central taxonomy group can maintain taxonomies? .....

Open Research

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