note: This project is in the realm of the pipe dreams yet.
basic idea
To be able to reuse the righ context information coming from the taxo-terms, to automate routine tasks or change the current node.
brief history, similar ideas
- system vocabularies
- they are introduced to serve a specific purpose
- for example the forum module uses them for all its hierarchy needs. This is an example of very specific, reuse of the "vocabulary" context
- the slides on http://conference.iproms.org use a system vocabulary to prefill templates for different slide types
- action/workflow
- while this couple does not use the context information from taxonomy, it does come a long way to take into account the context of the node. It introduces state, which is an explicit label for a workflow state, attached to a node. The ideas are somewhat similar, but their targets are different.
I first toyed with the idea for the slides.module used on the forementioned website. I never finished that properly, but the idea is interesting, since you have an naive understanding, what something means, when you tag it.
hypothetical example
Let's take event.module. At the moment you extend a node type using nodeapi. Any node of that nodetype becomes an event. What if we had an event vocabulary? Then any node, which has a term from the said event vocabulary can be an event. That gives us the flexibility to assign more meaning to a taxonomy term. We can have meetings - event(start/end) + attendees + location, trips - event + atenddees + route, and so on. The OO crowd can think of it as kind of inheritance system.
tbc
to be updated soon
