OJS plugin: Thesaurus (tematres integration)

[mbria]

Dear fellows,

Let me start with some memories:

As was published here some time ago, we were working on a OJS improvement.
We wanted to extend OJS to be able to work with controlled vocabularies.

As in every project we started making some research and we found a nice free software thesaurus management tool called tematres that was doing it's work really well (see it's features).
Diego Ferreyra (the original author of this tool) was happy to hear that somebody wanted to integrate tematres with OJS so he drives us to Nicolas Poulain who developed tematresview that is a javascript/ajax interface to call tematres web services.

With all this stuff on the table, we only need to ensemble all the parts to develop a new OJS plugin that we called: Thesaurus.
As is described in it's interface when "Thesaurus" is "...enabled and configured, users will be able to select keywords from tematres controlled thesaurus."

UPDATE: This plugin is finished and released at: http://www.comunitic.net/OJS/thesaurus/thesaurus_v0.6.tgz

How it looks like?

Thesaurus is a generic plugin, that will be shown in the System Plugin list as:


This plugin include some settings as the URL of your tematres installation or your preferred theme:


When you enable Thesaurus plugin (if you also ask OJS to request keywords in your articles) the original "coma-separtated-keyword-text-field":


... will be replaced with an improved keyword selector:


If "Add/delete term" is clicked, a popup (lightbox style) window emerges to let you select between your tematres' terms:


You could navigate through the thesaurus hierarchically (Theme list):


... Alphabetically:


... or Search:


Each term include very detailed information as it's taxonomy, a few kind of notes, related terms or specific term, that will be shown if you clic on (i) icon.


If you like to add/remove a term, you only need to click on the green arrow icon and OJS form will be updated to save those new keywords:


That's all about the plugin.

Thanks a loot to Alec and the rest of the OJS team for this amazing magazine management system and to the incredible support they are doing every day in this forum.

See you,

m.

[thebigchuckster]

wow - this is what We've been talking about at work!

i do have a query about it - have you written the plugin to specifically replace the Indexing term field? or is it fairly generic? (we want to get authors to add reviewer interests with their submissions and pick from a limited vocab list).

[mbria]

Hi,

Field replacement is done via JQuery (OJS' hooks are not detailed enough right now) so it could be easily changed to define which field/fileds need to be replaced with the "thesaurus' term selector".

The only problem we will found it's that not every HTML element include an ID, so it could be a little tricky to construct the right selectors to remove the help texts associated with every field.

Any case, your suggestion is a really good improvement for the plugin so I will try to find time to develop it on October or so (if nobody else does before).

I'm happy it seams useful for somebody.

Cheers,

m.

[mcrider]

Hi mbria,

Your plugin looks great! Just curious -- did you develop for 2.2.3 or 2.3 (in CVS), which will be out by september? OJS 2.3 has a built in jQuery plugin which should make implementing jQuery code easier, and also has many more divs throughout the templates to make selecting elements easier.

Cheers,
Matt

[mbria]

Thanks Matt for your gentle words.

More I play with OJS, more I like how is it coded so I really appreciate kind words from OJS' development team.

Our plugin was developed for OJS 2.2.2/2.2.3 but on September I will test it against the new version.

I'm glad to hear about those improvements. Any case, if the keyword input field is still called "#subject" and OJS methods didn't change much I suppose our plugin will work as fine as now. The only change required will be removing JQuery libs from our headers.

If you think our plugin worth to be included in next OJS release, just mail me at marc.bria[at]uab.cat and I will send you our release version (with [OJS] as subject prefix to avoid my spam filters) to let your team review the code.

BTW, we also finished the Catalan translation (reading tools and help) extending the work done by UOC's people (that released a great Catalan version some months ago) so once again, just in case you think will be nice to deliver a OJS will another lang full translated, I will also send those files to you.

As I said in a former post, we are now on vacations and we were waiting until September to release the plugin and the translation in a more "formal" way... but I'm sure my people will be happy to speed it up if it means that could be included in the next official release.

Finally, let me clarify that "thesaurus plugin" original idea is from Juan Muñoz Justicia and I just develop what I was asked for. So all kudos (except the development ones) to him.

Cheers,

m.

[mbria]

Hi,

Is September and as was promised, the thesaurus plugin is now released (under GPL license) at: http://www.comunitic.net/OJS/thesaurus/thesaurus_v0.6.tgz

Please, give a try it and come back with feedback.

BTW Matt, what do we need to do to propose this module to be included in next OJS release?
It's ok to post it here or do we need to publish it as a bugtrack issue.
We will be really happy to see this plugin included as a part of the official release so feel free to suggest improvements if the code is not following OJS standards.

Finally, I need to correct last post: I took all the credit for the development and this is simply wrong.
This module is mainly a tematresview adaptation, so I just developed the interface between OJS and tematresview (striping tematresview) and is Nicolas' code the one that is doing all the dirty job of talking with tematres webservices.

Thanks you all,

m.

[jmacgreg]

Hi Marc,

That's great news, and a wonderful contribution to the community! I also saw that you posted the plugin to Bugzilla (http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4712); we'll be happy to consider the inclusion of your plugin for a future release of OJS (not 2.3 unfortunately, as it's almost out), but the best place for the plugin for the time being is in our plugin gallery. Since this is no longer in development and has been released, I will move this thread to that forum.

Again, thanks to your team for sharing this! I look forward to taking a look.

Cheers,
James

[mbria]

Thanks James.

It's a pity we are late for 2.3, but done is done.

We will follow this thread as well as bugtrack to see any comments or modifications required (if any) by OJS.

BTW, I changed the thread title to follow the plugin gallery pattern.
I didn't test this module against OCS, but if the engine, the url and field ID are similar it should also work out of the box or with minimal modifications.

We will test it against OCS2.3 as soon as we start our magazine migration.

Keep in touch,

m.

PD: OJS 2.2.3 missing modules for Catalan translation will be released this week.

[nikolas]

Dear Sir,

We have problem with our thesaurus plugin. In TemaTres view when we want to assign keywords only level_0 shows up and no other terms in hierarchy. Is it possible that file tematresViewConfig.php is missing form the instalation plugin

since /var/www/html/ojs223/plugins/generic/thesaurus/tematresViewConfig.php doesn't exist.

require_once(/var/www/html/ojs223/plugins/generic/thesaurus/tematresViewConfig.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/html/ojs223/plugins/generic/thesaurus/tematresViewAjax.php on line 24

Thanks a lot in advance