It sounds like this may be a bit basic for some (it goes ‘back’ as far as hierarchies), but I found the following article a good start: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags

I did intend for the ticking to be done once the article is finished so the tick boxes would appear at the bottom of the text. This could be done whilst the article was being written (but not efficiently with a large ontology).

Tim

That seems like an interesting solution to a difficult problem. I’m not sure how the ticking would work within a body of text. One of my major gripes with including lots of links within text is it can hinder the reader’s eye when scanning the copy.

Be nice to see it in action.

Prompted by this discussion, I’m trying a slightly different approach based on a combination of hierarchy and folksonomy (or plain metadata). Here are the steps I’m building in : (quick glossary – hcat = hierarchical category, kw = folksonomy tag or keyword)

1) scan post for words that match hcats and show them with tick boxes for selection

2) let the user add their own kws and scan them for related hcats

3) let the user tick appropriate hcats

4) allow the user the option to (i) map any remaining kws to categories (synonyms) or (ii) place the kw in hierarchy (possibly moderated)

5) store the remaining kws in a ‘metadata’ field.

step 5 can be used if people later wish to add a new category and find related items (e.g. I add Cornwall as a kw and a later users decides to create a real category for it and searches in meta data for it).

This may seem long winded but it allows people to just add keywords if they like but it helps them to add (and start to create) hierarchical categories.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[J. Sinclair] However, with corporate intranets and knowledge management systems, etc., you often don?t have enough users to make free-tagging useful. You could however, allow tagging from a restricted vocabulary to prevent the synonym-tagging problem (eg. what one person calls ?tps? another calls ?tpsreport?). The tricky thing is getting this restricted vocabulary to match the vocabulary that the users actually use, rather than what the designer thinks the users use, or even what the managers think the users use. Some writers suggest that you allow free-tagging initially, then come back and analyse the data later, and consolidate the vocabulary into a finite list of allowable tags/categories. This may not be practical in all situations however.

Idea: what if you let users submit a ‘tag request’ in this scenario? If you had a list that was ‘good enough’ for most uses, then let users submit requests for the arcane ones (’tpsreport’) to a human ‘tag curator’ for consideration.

So, the thing now is to come up with a suitable UI which shows the relationships between the journal entries and the ?of interest? links.

That’s an interesting task; what might that look like? A list of tags at the end of a post (“design, typography, Macs”) that link to a link list category page? Do I understand your use case properly?

I (and others) are also curious to see how you might solve this in an EE context. There’s a dearth of quality tutorials for that deep CMS, and one reason many from that community come here!

What I’d like to do is turn my ‘of interest’ links into related links which can be linked to from journal entries. I’m a little bit frustrated with the links turning into an archive which is totally flat in terms of categorisation.

So, the thing now is to come up with a suitable UI which shows the relationships between the journal entries and the ‘of interest’ links.

Oh, I’m using the Linkslist plugin for this which has built in support for tags and creating tag clouds. Couple that with the Keywords plugin and you have a complete system for handling it.

The pain is migrating all the data manually…

I agree that letting users tag however they wish is likely to cause confusion for others searching.