Jalaloedien Abrahams

Tag Cloud for KnowledgeTree

February 21st, 2007

More than fluffy-white plumes

KnowledgeTree gets a bit of silver lining with the new Tag Cloud plugin. A tag cloud basically serves as a visual representation of data or content on a website. The content or data is weighted and depicted in such a way so as to make it obvious what has a larger occurrence and what occurs less frequently. Still not making sense?…Whats that? An example? No problem

Let’s say you have a basket of fruit made up of:

-4 x apples
-2 x bananas
-10 x oranges
-1 x pear

If you put each type of fruit in their own container, it might end up looking a bit like this:

So without being a mathematical genius you would easily be able to tell at first glance which fruit you have more of, just by looking at the size of the containers. If you guessed oranges, give yourself a gold star….if you didn’t please join little Timmy in corner of the room…thanks

This is how a tag cloud work. Its takes data/content, puts them into ‘containers’ based on specific criteria and you get to see which containers are bigger and which are smaller.

How does it work in KnowledgeTree?

Inside of KnowledgeTree you now have a Tag Cloud dashlet.

You will notice how text elements vary in size. Each text element is actually a tag. These tags are attached to each document you add to the repository, and if you remember our example with the basket of fruit, you can think of these tags as our containers. As each document is assigned a descriptive tag, those documents with the same tag are dropped into their own ‘container’.

Here we see how tags are added.

What you see in the dashlet is a visual representation of this as some tags appear to be bigger than others, indicating that that tag was assigned to more documents than others. So bigger tags = more occurrences and smaller ones = less occurrences. Pretty simple eh?
Clicking on these tags will redirect you a results page displaying all of the documents that have been attached the relevant tag.

The results page.

Conclusion

To some it might seem to be useless fluff, but to others it’s a useful tool allowing you to get a birds-eye view of the kinds of documents being added to your repository. You either like it, or you don’t, but being able to view data in this way is both useful and easy on the eyes.

Entry Filed under: New features