Taxonomy NCO

Taxonomy NCO uses Normalised Co-Occurrence analysis to look for relationships between terms in Drupal vocabularies. This allows us to infer semantic relationships between terms, and thus to provide advanced 'you may also be interested in' links. On large vocabularies this technique can bring big improvements in user experience and SEO.

Configurable taxonomy analysis is used to find related subjects, and thus get round the problem of ever diverging and fragmenting folksonomies:

eg. Taxonomy NCO running on the School of Everything dataset finds that - Tai Chi - is related to: Qigong - Tao Yin - Taoist Yoga - chi kung - kung fu - Taiji - qi gong - Tai Chi Chuan - Meditation - Feng Shou kung fu - relaxation - martial arts - self defence - health - Yang style & Baguazhang.

Also known as "Matchy Matchy", Taxonomy NCO provides automated recommendations - "You may also be interested in ... " links. The accompanying semantic clustering module works out the big subjects of interest in a community, allowing us to provide users with a clear and dynamic form of site navigation that changes automatically as new interests bubble up in the community. Module outputs:

• A 'related subjects' block to put on node and taxonomy pages.
• Views 3 integration to give user configurable related tags views - eg. 'you may also be interested in' clickable lists
• A function to return related $tids based on a similarity cutoff value.
• A theme function to display related term names with links and SKOS RDF decoration.

The base module taxonomy_nco relies on data created by the module taxonomy_nco_analysis. This analyses taxonomy data. Please see Readme.txt in the module for installation and configuration instructions. Taxonomy NCO analysis works best on larger data sets for good semantic inference, but 'you may also be interested in... ' recommendation functionality works well on smaller vocabularies. Functions are provided to output similarity data in RDF and RDFa formats as SKOS serialisation.

This module was presented at Drupal London - the presentation is on slideshare:
Joining the Docs: Back to the Future with Taxonomy and the New Semantics

Original Drupal 5 version developed at School of Everything
Drupal 6 & 7 ports were supported by Brightonart & Camart

Taxonomy NCO works on its own, but it does also have integration for the following modules:

• Taxonomy Entity Index - For the analysis of taxonomy on entities other than nodes.
• Multiblock - For multiple Taxonomy NCO blocks with different configs. This is especially for use with the new multi-vocabulary functionality.

In order to make use of these integrations, simply install these modules and Taxonomy NCO will detect them automatically and use them.

Image: Node Globe by Dan Zen