So Confused with the Taxonomy

The key is to focus in on what the nodes are ABOUT, as iandickson says. Yes. I mention in another comment here that if they are structured like films or bottles of wine, you can figure out fairly easily what the vocabs should be or contain. I'm planning on hosting articles, so I had to bust out the college writing style guides to figure out the attributes I might need. Practicality of getting users to actually classify the articles may be another thing. Perhaps this works in a low volume, high quality site, but not in a site which is based around short snips of peoples' opinion as in a forum.

Rick Cogley :: rick.cogley@esolia.co.jp
Tokyo, Japan

I looked at my notes, and the key imo is to focus what you want the site to do. If you search for the classification systems PMEST and BC2 on Google, lots of links come up about those schemes, which seem mostly to be used to classify library books, but were useful to get my head straight about how to build the categories I wanted on my site.

Also, some sites like:
http://dmoz.org - lots of categories, as an example http://www.kmconnection.com/DOC100100.htm - faceted classification http://facetmap.com/ - commercial web software to allow users to browse "facet maps" written in XML.

I made a list of everything I wanted to put on the site, or have put on, and tried to categorize it. Since the categories are about the writing on the site, and not, say, objects or products like bottles of wine, it is a little more esoteric and perhaps does not perfectly fit the BC2 or PMEST concepts.

However, if you just focus on what you want to classify, you can figure out what facets, or aspects, need to be tracked. Also, I think you need to balance it with practicality. I mentioned above how people might not be motivated to actually put things in classifications, and that was from an interesting article by John Udell (Byte mag writer, technologist, and generally cool guy) about his efforts in the area.

Hth.

Rick Cogley :: rick.cogley@esolia.co.jp
Tokyo, Japan

Rick,
I would really like to thank you for taking the time to lay the above structure out. When I first saw Drupal, I saw this structure and the power of it.

Then I started working with the modules as containers for the data and went off track laying out the structure. I began to look at Drupal from a module perspective and not from a taxonomy perspective. I allowed myself to get into frustrated frenzy about not being able to drill down, group and layout the data in a crossed index manner, utilizing the uniqueness of Drupal.

Your layout above especially the "format type" really helps me look as things correctly. Throw the Relative module into the above layout and a magical very slick grouped structure begins to appear with the drill down that I was looking for and needed. Minutes before I just had pages and pages of "common interest stuff" sub-grouped within the module usaing terms that don't display as catagories. The pages were getting so long with posted nodes; they wern't even useful and had the appearance of clutter.

There is still one that is throwing me off. Recipes.
Ok … in the above example it would naturally go into “Format Types” but then I get a bit confused.
Recipes module (like forum) allows for it own structure. So would Recipes also be a vocab? And this is were I really get twisted around.

would I group the vocab Recipes terms as;
Meals
-Dinner
-Lunch
-Desert
Soups
-beef
-chicken

Format Types
-Articles
-Recipes

Topics
- home cooked meals

Then we have Attributes verses the vocab Recipes, would I just forget about Attributes in this case, because I can a see a dupe structure … unless for Attributes .. I went:
-Mexican
-American
-Japanese
-German

?

For a newbie to taxonomy, who wants a simple set of three terms that can be assigned to any content type (including a forum topic), I think that this would be the easiest approach.

Just to clarify: when you enable the forum module, it automatically creates a 'Forums' vocabulary, and a taxonomy term is automatically created for each forum that you add. Thinking of a vocabulary as an overview of all forums, and of a taxonomy term as a forum that holds topics, may be a simpler way to look at it (seeing that more people are familiar with the concept of a forum than with the concept of taxonomy).

Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh