Economics Taxonomies in Drupal

The Drupal economics_taxonomies module can be used in Drupal installations to gain access to well established vocabularies for economics over the web. Economics contents curated in Drupal (journal articles, blog entries, etc.) can be indexed using terms from this vocabularies, without a need to install them locally.

The module uses the Web Taxonomy, another Drupal module, to integrate these vocabularies as taxonomies into Drupal. Other than the core taxonomy module, Web Taxonomy records IDs (normally URIs) of terms, and thus allows an update from the taxonomy source. The plugin architecture of Web Taxonomy module allows building other modules to add data sources/vocabularies. The only prerequisite is that the sources provide a web services interface.

Based on Web Services for Economics, Economics Taxonomies implements such plugins. It currently is in sandbox state and supports

• STW Thesaurus for Economics
• Scholars from economics and neighboring fields, a subset of the German personal name authority file (part of GND)

and allows for linking to the respective resources. Since Drupal publishes these links in RDFa, it makes a Drupal site part of the large LOD cloud.