[Zope] Thesaurus / ontology / taxonomy support in Zope-Plone

[Benjamin Michiels]

Hi,

(I'm new to Zope and Plone, so don't hesitate to indicate me a more appropriate
mailing-list if necessary)

I am curently looking for a library (idealy, ready-for-Plone3.x-Zope2.10)
allowing the creation and management of a thesaurus. Our requirements are the
following:

- creation of our own thesaurus (that is, terms AND relations between terms),
and indexing (and retrieving) documents with terms defined in our thesaurus,
- "thesauraus management facilities", such as batch editing of content items
(e.g. for all documents indexed by keyword "A" and "B", replace keywords "A" and
"B" by keyword "C").
- user-friendly interface. This could a be tree-like structure (with - ideally -
several levels of indexing), such as:
  Shape  -  TS: Square
             + TS: Triangle  -  TS: Scalene triangle
                                      + TS: Equilateral triangle - [...]
                                                                               
 - [...]
                                       -  [...]
              -  [...]

After some - basic - searches, it appears that there are not many thesaurus
management developed for Plone/Zope (and maybe even in python) yet, but as I'm
new to Zope-Plone, I may be mistaking:
- PloneOntology looked interesting (http://plone.org/products/ploneontology) but
is it still maintened (no release for one year)?
- icSemantic / pyThesaurus (http://plone.org/products/icsemantic-thesaurus
http://www.platecom.com/) looks promising but there isn't much documentation and
the website is only in Spanish for the moment).
- Tabajara (http://plone.org/products/tabajara) looks like a dead project (only
works for Plone 2.1??).
- I don't think Portal Taxonomy (http://plone.org/products/portal_taxonomy) or
AT Vocabulary Manager (http://plone.org/products/atvocabularymanager) are suited
for thesaurus
- pyWordNet (http://osteele.com/projects/pywordnet/index.html) appears to be
more a back-end to WordNet thesaurus than a thesaurus mangement tool.
- so far, TextIndexNG3 (http://www.zopyx.de/projects/TextIndexNG3) looks the
most promising, event if it doesn't appear to offer thesaurus management tools
yet...

What do you think of it and/or is there already a discussion on this topic?

Thank you in advance,

Benjamin Michiels
--
Software AG Benelux