The document discusses plans for a Drupal taxonomy code sprint to improve how Drupal handles hierarchical taxonomies, large vocabularies, and term reconciliation. It notes challenges with multiple taxonomies, permissions, search integration, and semantic web applications. Participants will submit code patches to Drupal and participate in a Google Code project. Back-porting solutions to D5 is discussed. Examples like the Encyclopedia of Life and biology sites using workarounds are provided, with EOL's taxon-centric approach and LifeDesk profiles outlined. Taxonomy management is highlighted as important for projects like EOL and term reconciliation.

1. 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?

2. Best Practices Google Code: Need a Google account https://code.google.com Drupal CVS Patches: tag “EOL Taxonomy Sprint”

3. 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?

4. The Encyclopedia of Life David P. Shorthouse Vitthal Kudal

5. 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)

6. 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

7. Schema for Data Objects

8. 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

9. 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)