Drupal Taxonomy Code Sprint

Why?

How well does Drupal currently handle hierarchical taxonomies

What about multiple & extremely large vocabularies?

What about reconciliation (synonymy, relatedness)?

What about machine tagging?

What about Semantic Web?

Can we hook permissions/roles into selection of terms?

How well will our solutions integrate with search?

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Best Practices

Google Code: – Need a Google account– https://code.google.com

Drupal CVS– Patches: tag “EOL Taxonomy Sprint”

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Who & Why

You are leading this sprint & you will take ownership of where we take it– You will submit patches to Drupal’s CVS– You will participate in Google Code svn

We want to see D6 & D7 lead the way for CMS’ but many sites continue to make use of D5– Can we push for core solutions that can be back-

ported?Can we push for flexible solutions that cut through idiosyncratic needs?Can we develop or refactor existing modules if we cannot pave the way to development in core?

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The Encyclopedia of Life

David P. Shorthouse

Vitthal Kudal

Biology-Centric, Drupal Solutions

BugGuide– Are not using taxonomy or views

ScratchPads– Use taxonomy as a mechanism to tag content

with scientific names

Many biological pursuits have chosen other CMS’ or Drupal workarounds (e.g. Animal Diversity Web)

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EOL Approach

Content aggregated from other biodiversity

websites using client-produced XML docs– Schema produced in-house using existing (Dublin Core) and

emerging standards (TDWG: Species Profile Model)

Front-end: Ruby on Rails

Back-end: MySQL

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Schema for Data Objects

EOL Approach - Drupal

Major participatory thrust: Drupal multisites (eventually standalone) called LifeDesks– Three profiles: Expert, Citizen Scientist, K-12

• December release: taxa-centric , LifeDesk: Expert

– Each have capacity to build “species pages”:• Contents of which are atomized as nodes (e.g. chapters of text,

images, videos, specimens, etc.) for storage

• Aggregated for HTML representation (View? Template? Panel?)

– Each must produce an XML document using schema just as do existing biodiversity website partners

– http://lifedesk.eol.org

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Taxonomy Management

Immensely important for the success of EOL’s LifeDesks, EDIT’s ScratchPads, and other biology-centric pursuits– Editor is paramount to success– Reconciliation of terms is critical

• Drag & drop functionality between terms and synonyms & differentiation among kinds of synonyms (i.e. objective synonym, subjective synonym, common name, language of common name)

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