Sorry for cross posting and for the looong post (I tried to structure it
like a plip). What follows is just a tentative to collect some ideas on the
classification of contents in Plone with some proposals of mine.
At the last Plone Conference in Naples and often on the Plone lists, I met
many interested people about this issue.
DEFINITIONS
Keywords/Labels/Tags are different ways to refer to single words or chunks
of words (phrases) applied to contents. In Plone they are arranged in a flat
structure for a whole Plone site, no trees or other distinctions are allowed
out of the box. Standard Plone keywords are shared across all users in the
DC:Subject metadata field.
Web 2.0 applications brought more power to the end users (see Flickr,
Delicious) so each user can tag any content as s/he wants. The sum of all
the tags make a folksonomy (a bottom-up taxonomy made by ³folk²). Usually
the result is viewed in a tag-cloud view. It¹s a very powerful and costless
tool but it really works only with a huge amount of contents/users.
Unfortunately social tagging (aka folksonomy) presents some important
disadvantages like language issues (polisemy, homonymy, plurals, synonymy,
ego-oriented) and user experiences issues (low findability and scalability,
alphabetical criterion, semantic relationships are not visually supported).
Faceted Classification (different from the clustering) is a bibliographic
technique that has become very popular on the web in the last years. So each
content is classified combining labels from different facets where each
facet has a name and addresses a different conceptual dimension or feature
type relevant to the collection. Facets can be flat or hierarchical.
Ontologies with the meanings related to the Semantic Web (look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology)
MOTIVATION
Plone lacks a content classification system able to satisfy recent modern
information retrieval needs. The flat keywords mechanism is insufficient
both for a user-centric tagging classification environment and, more, for a
complex professional digital environment (made by "experts").
Many just released (or not yet) Plone products try to fill this gap in
different ways. We can try to harmonize them in a unique classification
system able to satisfy both the tagging story and the structured
classification story letting the site manager have some options to choose in
order to fit as more as possible the different single needs.
PROPOSAL
The main goal is to provide a complete overwrite of the classification part
with a completely fresh new architecture able to satisfy the most use cases
emerged in recent years. Obviously the Dublin Core Metadata Set has to be
taken in consideration as usual. A true semantic classification of contents
should coincide with the DC:subject, indeed.
We can mix the tagging mechanism with a more structured one without loosing
the user centric approach.
On the general ³BACKEND² side (componentized in a site manager part and in
an editor part):
- A thesaurus seems to be a ³must have² if we want to manage synonyms or
similar to reduce the linguistic issues. Look at PloneGlossary from
Ingeniweb. An A-Z view (like in AZLinks product) should be appreciated to
browse the whole thesaurus in alphabetical order. At the PloneConference I
see the Giovanni Toffoli¹s talk about KMap project in which he cited a
Plonesaurus product more to investigate. In this sense, PloneOntology seems
to be a good candidate too, even if maybe is overkill.
- On the tagging story side we have many options to consider.
Lovely.tagging or other tagging tools (used or going to be used in
Plone4Artists bundle) are promising. Look at the Jon Baldivieso¹s recent
post
(http://www.nabble.com/Product-for-simple-content-tagging-tf4596065s6741.htm
l#a13121772) for a panoramic view on it.
- On the more classical tree-classification side we have
ATVocabularyManager, PortalTaxonomy and PloneOntology. First two products
need integration at AT level to be used. PloneOntology, instead, is a
standalone classification system and can be applied on top of any content
type without touch its code.
- The last one is PloneFacetedClassification, an add-on (not yet released)
commissioned by my company (Noiza) and developed with the help of Abstract
and Redomino guys to implement a very basic faceted classification on top of
any content type in Plone. It has some issues but, basically, works.
On the ³FRONTEND² side (what an anonymous user can view):
- Many products provide a tagcloud view (TagCloud, Tag Cloud Explorer,
Vaporisation) with different approaches.
- Faceted browsing: a very low support is offered in Portal Taxonomy. Always
in our PloneFacetedClassification we integrated the powerful MIT¹s Exhibit
framework (http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/) but it definitely needs more
love.
- Relations¹ Graphs browsing (PloneOntology, Bersabea ) is a third way...
At the present time every of these products is hard to integrate each other
and, abo
