Using Drupal with a multiaxial system of categories

When I started to migrate my collection of links from typo3 over to drupal I used the occasion to rethink about my categories. I was using a polyhierarchy to classify every link. What you will find on this website is a result of that. Some things might still change. Here are the major points:

  1. I will use the same categorization scheme for all the content of my website. Every blog entry, link, static page, ... will be categorized the same way. This will be a start in the direction of knowledge management. Someone looking for information about for example 'nursing informatics' will find any entry available. The category browser (based on the great taxonomy browser) can be used to further refine the search and limit it for example to only external links.
  2. I started to create several orthogonal vocabularies for the categorization that can be combined to describe the content. Drupal can be set to allow the use of multiple terms from one vocabulary. So using one or many terms from a couple vocabularies can be very powerful to describe the content of a page. The vocabularies I started to create are:
  • topic - It will be used to describe what the page is about
  • page type - What kind of a page this is (e.g. article, blog, linklist, ...)
  • country - Is the content specific for a certain country or region. (e.g. ICNP translation activities in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria - each country term would be selected)
  • language - The language the page is written in.
  • target group - All content could be restricted to what is of interest for a specific target group (e.g. students)

That way I hope, it will be easy to get at the contents of this website rather easy. Putting everything interesting I find on the site and categorizing it. This website hopefully will get the character of the growing knowledge base.
Listen to this article

Language:

Add new comment