Terms Related to Terms

System

There was a mention in a post from '03 about an enhancement request to allow terms to be related to other terms. Has anything changed since MT 3.5.1 or is anything planned to support this?

Specifically I want to relate a term from one vocab to a term (or terms) in a different vocab. The relationship is non-hierarchical although both terms in the relationship are part of their own hierarchical vocabularies.

mikelauruhn

Dave,
I think you have a pair of options for getting that additional value associated. Probably more based on what what information you have at your disposal and your long term maintenance plans.

Using MetaTagger 4.x, I can have this vocabulary. Note that I have added the <family> and <solutionType> as elements for each product node:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Vocab>
<SVHeader>
<UIDPrefix>NEWUID</UIDPrefix>
</SVHeader>
<SVTerm UID="Prod::000">
<_sorted>true</_sorted>
<label>OurProducts</label>
<child UREF="Prod::100"/>
<child UREF="Prod::200"/>
</SVTerm>

<SVTerm UID="Prod::100">
<alt>widget</alt>
<family>Premium</family>
<solutionType>Consumer Electronics</solutionType>
<label>Product X</label>
<parent UREF="Prod::000"/>
</SVTerm>

<SVTerm UID="Prod::200">
<alt>gizmo</alt>
<family>Stellar</family>
<solutionType>Automotive</solutionType>
<label>Product Y</label>
<parent UREF="Prod::000"/>
</SVTerm>
</Vocab>

Using this you can edit the iwmtresolveuids postprocessor to "iwmtresolveuids -grab solutionType". This means that for any document that is tagged a product, add the corresponding solutionType. (you could also -grab alt, -grab family, etc.).

In this case, a document "about" Product Y would have a metadata record with:
<facet>
<facetName>OurProducts</facetName>
<descriptor>
<vocab>Prod</vocab>
<code>200</code>
<label>Product Y</label>
<UREF>Prod::200</UREF>
<solutionType>Automotive</solutionType>
</descriptor>
</facet>

The other option would be to use the MetaTagger Rules Engine, which makes associations between two vocabularies. If you have all the products in one vocabulary and all the solution types in another, you could make assocations: if 'Product Y' in vocab OurProducts, then add 'Automotive' from vocab solutionTypes. This is assuming that you are using OurProducts as a MetaTagger vocab to assign values and the solutionTypes values are always associated with those products. (Good option if this seems the only way to associate "Automotive" with an article that doesn't offer any clues that it is necessarily about Automotive solutions.)

One other consideration is that with the 'iwmtresolveuids -grab' method, you are only getting that term added to the metadata record. Using the Rules, you are getting UID number assigned for the Product Family, which you could then leverage for other Rules or other applications you may use downstream (where a unique identifier is more valuable than an additional label).

Apologies for the dissertation.
MikeL