Omeka-S seems to have many nice ways to provide values for a property when editing an Item or Media object. CustomVocab provides a choice list and ValueSuggest gives you a autocomplete lists, and AdvancedResourcetemplate, ValueSuggestAny and Thesaurus leverage these even more.
But what I miss(cannot find?) is a way to SELECT a value from a (sub)TREE-of-terms(like a Thesaurus or so). You find such a functionality in many systems as it is a nice way to help a user, inexperienced with all the possible terms, find his way to the most appropriate term as value. It is typically the use case where autosuggest is to “free” and needs too much prior knowledge to work and were a flat list of terms maybe too long or confusing for the user.
Is there at the moment a way to do this in Omeka-S? Am I just missing this? Or would it be beneficially to build something like this? The latter I would envision as a slight rewrite/extension module of/with the module ValueSuggest with something like “children_suggest($node)” and “parents_suggest($node)” accompanied with a fine treeselect widget. And of course a way to set the (sub)tree-root node in your resource template for every property with the valuetype: “ValueSelectTree”.
Such a functionality would also give you a way to merge many custom vocabs into a single thesaurus like term-tree vocab for you Omeka-S application. The selected (subtree)root-node in your resource templates takes care of selecting the individual vocab again as choice list for the various properties. This seems generic and much easier to maintain and bundle than dealing with a lot of custom vocabs or remote vocabs that need to be selected via complex queries to be defined by the one that is defining a resource template.
I love to hear if this feature is missing or not.
Greetings, John
Have you tried Omeka S - Taxonomy ?
It looks like it would fit your needs: it allows to define several taxonomies which are basically groups of terms. And taxonomy terms can be arranged in a tree.
The documentation is available here : Taxonomy user manual
Hi Julian, first of all: thanks!
But what a coincidence, namely I found this module about an hour ago and just ended experimenting with this module, and indeed, it allows the selection method as I would like. I would update my post with my experience and now read your reply 
But, alas, it still has a few (major) drawbacks for me:
-
it seems to work only with a taxonomy tree built within Omeka-S consisting of Omeka-S resources (Items). I would prefer to use any of the standard term-tree repositories as e.g. bundled in ValueSuggest, including e.g. a simple term-tree in a CustomVocab as built by Thesaurus. A “taxonomy” living within Omeka-S only is not easily portable. Surely importing a CustomVocab is easier than importing a collection of Omeka-S resources that denote the taxonomy. And even adding a new term-repository entry in ValueSuggest is not that hard, and opens up its use to all Omeka-S installations. Though, I must admit, the Taxonomy approach has the advantage of easier edit/update actions on the taxonomy.
-
The module allows not (yet) for setting a “node of a subtree(in the taxonomy)” in a resource template to use as (“filtered”) allowed subtree to select from.
-
and, finally, I am not so charmed from the Taxonomy approach of “dressing up” a complete functionality for working with newly introduced non standard Entities(Taxonomy and Taxonomy-term). I prefer the approach of just label these Items explictly with specific Classes and further on handle them with the standard tools for Items possibly “enriched” with tools for “Items of class Taxonomy-term” etc. Just like the module Thesaurus does. But you may say that this is a matter of taste…
Well, its good to know that I could do some of the things I want to do, with the module Taxonomy. But all in all it does not feel as a solution for handling a “thesaurus like”-repository by multiple Omeka-S instances in a fashion that allows “selection form a tree” instead of “selection from autocomplete lists”.