[Zope-CMF] List of subject/metadata sets?

marc lindahl marc@bowery.com
Tue, 05 Jun 2001 09:58:44 -0400


> From: seb bacon <seb@jamkit.com>
> 
> Yep, great idea.  I think there's a fairly tricky problem to solve
> here, though, which is that a list of categories from dmoz would be
> rather large.  Really we need the subject field to be heirarchical,
> too.  It would mean making a new Subject class with a tree structure,
> I guess. 

Internally, it could still be a multiple-select list for any given object's
Subject... it seems it's a problem of user interface, which also leads to
storage of a hierarchy in the tool.

> However, the first question I have is what might it look
> like in the metadata interface?  An 'explorer' expandable tree with
> tick boxes next to each category, perhaps?

It would be pretty easy if any one thing were allowed only one select in the
hierarchy, then it could be a hierarchical menu pick in the UI... but it
gets complicated if you allow multiple select.  Perhaps a hierarchical menu
with check-boxes?  But then it would be hard to see everything that might be
checked... perhaps a secondary display showing all currently checked...

> Similary, how would such a
> field get indexed?  I think we probably need to wait for drop-in
> indexes for this.  Just thinking aloud.

It seems that finally, you'd end up with a list, and perhaps each element
would somehow be a concatenation of the heirarchy so it could be parsed by
the UI but 'kept together' as keywords for the Catalog... maybe ':' or
something, so you'd get:

['Top:Adult:Shopping','Top:Society','Top:Adult:World:Polska:Czasopisma']

(just picking some stuff from structure.rdf.u8.gz ...)  perhaps you could
kill the 'Top', or prefix with 'rdf:' to distinguish rdf subjects...

just replying out loud ;)