Web Taxonomy

Allows you to define an external source for the Taxonomy Autocomplete field (i.e. a web service delivering a JSON list of Drupal modules, or an XML service delivering a list of descriptors from a thesaurus, or a SPARQL endpoint with RDF data). Multiple unrelated sites can connect to the same taxonomy. A local version of the term will be created and can be synced with the external term in the centralized vocabulary.

This is especially useful for combining information from many different sites when information is exposed with HTML data syntaxes like RDFa or microdata, or for linking Drupal contents to the Linked Data Cloud. (BTW, the storage of local "proxies" for the remote taxonomy terms implements a pattern currently discussed as "lightweigt abstraction layer" in the context of BIBFRAME Authorities.)

Plugins

The module is crafted to be extended by plugins, which implement the web access to a given taxonomy. Web taxonomy plugin for DBpedia may serve as an example for such a plugin. You can find other examples for Drupal modules, Economics taxonomies, the VIAF international authority file or the Getty vocabularies (Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Thesaurus of Geographical Names) in the sandboxes of the respective developers.

Background

An article by Lin Clark on IBM developerWorks demonstrates in detail how Web Taxonomy can be integrated into a larger usage scenario.

Credits

The Web Taxonomy module was developed by linclark. Since 2014 it is maintained by jneubert; this work is supported by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.