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Hi,
I'm working on a drupal site with a very complicated taxonomy.
Backstory: A polisci professor and team of students designed this
project first as a theoretcal exercise as part of a senior thesis
double major in political science and computer science, and then as
the project of a very devoted and smart student using drupal. It's
both amazingly cool and technically complex. At this point, we are
trying to help rein it in to the library servers and help support it
so that new crops of students can maintain it without needing to be CS
majors, and also to help them address a few issues and problems that
have been discovered over the past year or so. My colleague and I are
totally new to Drupal, and to this database. While he's working on the
solr indexing, I'm trying to help figure out the taxonomy issue.

See here: http://gtrp.haverford.edu/aqsi/aqsi/statements/mustafa-abu-al-yazids-interview-al-jazeera
Basically, the site indexes the public statements of al-qaeda. Each
statements is assigned a bunch of terms by students who have studied
jihad and al-qaeda.

Each term is composed of two parts.
First part: a keyword from a controlled list of keywords - there are
many of these and they include places, people, theories, and other
things. So, "Afghanistan", "Barack Obama", and "media" are all
keywords.
Second part: a context from a much smaller (around 20) collection of
contexts, including I guess how the keyword figures in this statement.
Example include "area of jihad, enemy of islam, religious relations"
and others.

So, the full term would be "media - enemy of islam" for example. And
each record includes a large number of these.

Going forward, we'd ideally like to allow users of the site to find
all three of the following:
1. Records that contain a particular two part term. (easy - that's
what taxonomy is for)
2. A list of terms that begin with the first part so that they can
select the modifier for it (also easy, if we make the second term a
subterm or child of the first, this will work fine)
3. A list of terms that have the second part as a qualifier. So, for
example, show me all terms in which anything is called an "enemy of
islam" and then let me choose which keyword is referred to as an enemy
of jihad and show me that record.

It's that third one that we can't figure out. The only way we can
think to accomplish this is to basically duplicate each entry so that
we'd say "Haverford - enemy of islam" and "enemy of islam - Haverford"
I think that will work, but since there are many statements, and each
statement has many terms, this solution doesn't seem ideal. Do any of
you have ideas?
Thanks very much.
Laurie
-- 
Coordinator for Digital Scholarship and Services
Haverford College Library
370 Lancaster Ave
Haverford, PA 19041
610-896-4226
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