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Tag Cloud for Container Objects

1 Requirements

1.1 Original Suggestion

 
It should be possible to show a tag cloud for objects within a courses and groups and offer a possibility to use this as an alternative navigation concept. Like the news or the calendar side block, a course or group should offer the possibility to activate a tag cloud block for all the tags related to objects within the course or group as a side block.
 
When a tag is clicked, all objects related to the tag are listed. Additionally related tags (tags that are assigned to the same objects) can be listed, too. It should also be possible to add additional tags from this list of related tags as filter (show only objects that are tagged with multiple terms).
 
The source of the tag cloud are keywords of meta data and user tags.
 
The user can select via an option of the block whether

• his/her personal tags should be displayed only or
• tags of other users (including keywords)

should be displayed.
 
Issues
 
The current idea is that all objects of a context (e.g. all objects and subobjects of a course) are represented in the tag cloud. It is questionable if the feature makes any sense on the category level, especially on larger installations. There would simply be too many tags.
 
Another reason why the category level may not be feasible would be performance. The time needed to gather all subobjects of a category and their tags would be to high. The performance would be even lower, if the permissions of the objects would needed to be checked before a tag is displayed.

1.2 Updated Feature Description

At April 29, 2013, the Jour Fixe has discussed this and the similar suggestion "Tag Cloud for Courses and Groups" and decided the following implementation:

• The container objects "Course" and "Group" should offer the possibility to show a "tag cloud" block.
• The block contains a tag cloud of all tags that have been assigned to objects within the course/group (including all subobjects, no RBAC check done yet). Tags of other users are displayed if the feature is activated in the administration.
• If the user clicks on a tag, all objects that have been assigned to the tag are listed. At this point ILIAS checks the RBAC permissions, so empty lists may appear (with a message) in case a user has no permission to access any of these objects. Additionally all objects list all their assigned tags.
• The size of the tag is determined by the number of assignments. We currently reject the request that the size is determined by the number of user accesses to the objects, because the number of accesses is not comparable between different object types (a forum has always more accesses as files).
• The request to be able to filter tags by "my tags/tags of other users", new tags and "popular" tags is too vague for us. We understand the "my tags/tags of other users" feature, but how would the "new tags" filter work? Would we need different options (last week, last month)?
• The integration of external thesauri would be an additional feature request. We would need a general interface to these kind of applications. Currently we are not aware of any standards here.
• The general editing of tags for an object will stay as it is (tag icon/link in the header toolbar).

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Release 5.0
• Funding: Helmut Schmidt Universität / UniBwH
• Development: Feature is to be developed by Leifos GmbH

3 Additional Information

• If you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding, please contact: your name / your e-mail

4 Discussion

Matthias Kunkel, 29 Apr 2013: There is a quite similar feature request called Tag Cloud for Courses and Groups. We should try to merge both requests to one page, e.g. by adding TOP 1.1 from that page to this page here (and close the other one).
 
P.S.: Done in the meantime.

Matthias Kunkel, 26 May 2013: To clarify the feature description in 1.2:

• Tagging will not be implemented on category level, right? What is about folders?
• Shouldn't we allow tagging in category as well and let administrators decide if they enable the feature or not? If categories are only used like web pages and do not contain a lot of sub-objects, the tag cloud won't be bigger as in a course. I think we should not patronise users too much.
• Do we implement a kind of semi-automatic proposition of tags to avoid spelling based synonyms like "Delfin" and "Delphin"?

Alex Killing: We got the funding settled now, since this is too late for 4.4, we will provide the implementation for ILIAS 4.5.

5 Implementation

JL 31 Oct 2014: This feature has been implemented in 5.0/trunk. It can be activated in the container settings in Additional features:

After adding some tags on the info page of any subobject of that container an additional navigation block will appear: