[Neos] Tags, TYPO3.Media, and the taxonomy work package, Oh My!

[Jacob Floyd]

Some of you are working on the media browser[1][2]. TYPO3.Media will organize assets with Tags[3]. These tags are conceptually similar to categories, ontologies, and taxonomies, and I wonder if we couldn't have a more general purpose tag/taxonomy/ontology system for use throughout Neos instead of a tagging solution that is specific to TYPO3.Media only. Neos has the potential to have some pretty awesome semantic features now that we've integrated VIE[4].

In TYPO3 CMS, there were a lot of different implementations of tags. DAM had one, and news had another. Other extensions tried to add tags or categories to pages in the page tree. These were all competing and generally did not work together (sharing categories between DAM and news for example could be problematic). An interesting effort to make categorization of stuff in TYPO3 CMS is SCOTTY(*S*emantic *C*ategory, *O*ntology, *T*ag and *T*axonomy S*y*stem).

* SCOTTY has had to add UUID'sto TYPO3 CMS, but we already have UUIDs.
* SCOTTY is also working on some semantic web technologies like SPARQL querieswhich will probably be used in an Extensions website for Neos similar to Packagist[9]. Semantic support could improve in Flow and Neos, but work has already begun.
* SCOTTY is also working on taxonomiesto create a taxonomy solution.

We have the TYPO3CR that Neos uses for it's node tree (pages, content elements...). But that is designed to be like typical file systems with hierarchical folders; that is, TYPO3CR doesn't have tags, categories, ontologies, or taxonomies. TYPO3.Blog stores tags on its posts in the PostRepository and each post can be in a single category (categories stored in CategoryRepository). RobertLemke.Plugin.Blog doesn't implement tags yet. Now, TYPO3.Media will have a TagRepository alongside its AssetRepository. What do we do when we want the Blog, Neos, and Media to share a set of tags? For sites that have blog or news like functionality as well as a media repository, how do we have a common ontology?

By implementing tags within TYPO3.Media, are we walking down the same path that TYPO3 CMS has already tread? Are we going to reach a point where we need to do major refactoring in order to support customer requested taxonomies or ontologies ("But in drupal I could...")?

This is not meant to flame, I'm just trying to look forward. Maybe TagRepository could be pulled out of TYPO3.Media and put in something like TYPO3.Tags or TYPO3.Taxonomy or something. How will TYPO3.Media work with the generic taxonomy solution that gets created as part of the taxonomy work package[11]?

Cheers,
Jacob Floyd

https://review.typo3.org/#/q/status:open+project:FLOW3/Packages/TYPO3.Media,n,z
http://forge.typo3.org/issues/45003
https://review.typo3.org/#/c/20974
http://viejs.org/
https://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-scotty
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-identity
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-semantic
https://github.com/sandstorm/Semantic
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uFyP1H559OFAcqUKiz3uEBdpdqqs4B22AbpnaoNsfvY/edit
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-taxonomy
http://forge.typo3.org/issues/47895