At work we have a varied number of websites selling second-hand products. The bosses have noticed that there’s often some overlap between the products sold on some of the websites and would like to syndicate content from one site to one or more of the others.
The main problem I’m having is that taxonomy on each site is different, so it’s not a straight-forward task to put adverts from Site A into a known taxonomy location in Site B.
e.g. three sites sell second-hand bicycles but each site’s each taxonomy is different…
Site A’s taxonomy: For Sale > Sports Equipment > Bicycles
Site B’s taxonomy: Bicycles > Mountain Bikes
Site C’s taxonomy: Second-hand > Bicycles > Adults’ Bikes > 26″ Wheel
The notion is, for example, that all adverts placed on Site A would be pushed to a routing engine which would decide whether or not the advert should be pushed out to other sites, and it struck me this could be a place to do the taxonomy mapping… but I’m stumped as to an elegant way to go about it. I’m also conscious that although these taxonomies are fairly stable, they’re not set in stone!
Anyone any ideas on how they’d go about approaching this problem?!
Cheers,
Adam
3
This problem is a discipline of Information Management.
The people whom I know with skills in this area all hold PhDs which is overkill for your problem.
For a general overview of how to approach this problem, look at slides 10-15 of this presentation.
http://www.slideshare.net/HeatherHedden/mapping-merging-multilingualtaxonomies
If you are planning to merge the sites, create a one-off mapping e.g. in a spreadsheet and then restructure all the pages.
If you want to run the websites in parallel, firstly your system will need to support dynamic presentation of information, and secondly, you’ll need to apply metadata to all the pages, and then configure your system to present the pages in the single new structure you want.
There are automatic tools to map, but they are intended for large projects.