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TagCloudPlugin

Description

Tag clouds give a very quick overview of the distribution of terms within a document base. This can be used to support navigation or just to display the characteristics of the given data. Tag clouds are quite common in blog archives where you can click on a tag in the cloud and list all postings that are tagged that way. Tag clouds can be generated on any list of terms that don't need to be "tags" in the more stricter sense, though the name of the figure is still "tag cloud".

How tag clouds are computed

First, the input data has to be tokenized and normalized to match each word in the input to a term by

1. splitting up the data, removing special characters,
2. mapping different terms on one term, like handling synonyms (e.g. twikiapps=TWikiApplication) (optional)
3. filtering unwanted words; there's a predefined list of (english) stop words that can applied
4. mapping plural to singular word forms (done rudimentarily for english only)

Once all terms have been counted they are mapped into a fixed set of buckets. For example given 102 different terms have been counted and ordered by frequency, they are mapped into a set of -- let's say -- 30 buckets that are containing those terms. Each term is assigned a weight, that is the ID of the bucket it has been sorted in.

In general the tag cloud renders the more frequent terms bolder and/or more colorful than the less frequent. See the exmaple below. But you are free to configure any variation of the appearance of a tag depending on its frequency.

Syntax Rules

%TAGCLOUD{(terms=)"<term-list>" ... }%

renders a tag cloud given a list of terms from which the term frequencies are extracted. There are a couple of options that infulence the way the list of terms is tokenized and processed, as well as the appearance of the resulting tag cloud.

Parameters:

• terms: input data, a list of terms; a term can have the form term:weight whereas the ocurrence of this term is counted with the given weight
• split: regular expression used to split up the input data (default: [/,\.?\s]+)
• stopwords: switch on/off filtering common (english) stop words (default: off)
• filter: regular expression of characters to be filtered out; possible values are 'on': to remove a predefined set of special chars, 'off' don't filter at all or an arbitrary string of characters to be replaced with a single space; default value is 'on'
• exclude: regular expression of terms to exclude from the tag cloud (default: undefined)
• include: regular expression of terms that should be included (default: undefined)
• buckets: number of buckets which to sort terms into (default: 40)
• sort: sort terms in the tag cloud alphabetically or by weight (alpha or weight) (default: alpha)
• group: format string to distinguish groups within the sortion; if the tag cloud is sorted alphabetically terms are groupd according their first letter; terms sorted by weight are groupd by their weight collected in tenner chunks. That is terms with a weight 1-10 are put in group "10", terms with a weight 11-20 are in "20" and so on; the current group displayed by replacing the pseudo variable $group in it; example: group="<b>$group</b>" (default: <empty>)
• reverse: rever the sorting (on or off) (default: off)
• min: minimum times a term must occur to be included in the tag cloud
• offset: integer value that is added to the weight number of a term (default: 1)
• lowercase: switch on/off converting terms to lowercase (default: off)
• plural: switch on/off counting plurals, if set to off plural terms are matched to their singular form (caution: very rudimentary and assuming the input data is all english, use stopwords="on" to get good results)
• map: list of terms to be normalized as synonyms; the format of this is: "from1=to1,from2=to2,..." Each occurrence of from1 will be mapped to to1 etc, and counted as such
• header: format string to precede the output
• format: format string for each tag in the tag cloud
• sep(arator): format string to be put between each tag in the cloud
• footer: format string appended to the output
• warn: switch on/off warning if no term was found (default: on)

Format strings (terms, header, format, sep and footer) might contain the following pseudo variables:

• $index: the number of the tag in the (sorted) tag cloud
• $term: the term itself
• $weight: the term weight (that is: bucket + offset)
• $count: the number the term has been counted
• $fadeRGB(startRed,startGreen,startBlue,endRed,endGreen,endBlue) color of the term given its current weight in a color gradient defined by the given 6 integer values; returns a string rgb(red,green,blue) that can be used in a css color property
• $percnt: expands to %
• $dollar: expands to $
• $n: expands to a linefeed
• $nop: is removed from the format string
• $group: grouping format string, see above

Example

Cloud for the above text:

You type:

%TAGCLOUD{"$percntINCLUDE{\"%WEB%.%TOPIC%\"}$percnt"
  header="<div style=\"text-align:center; padding:15px;line-height:180%\">"
  format="<span style=\"font-size:$weightpx;line-height:90%\"><a style=\"color:$fadeRGB(104,144,184,0,102,255);text-decoration:none\" title=\"$count\">$term</a></span>"
  footer="</div>"
  buckets="40"
  offset="12"
  lowercase="on"
  stopwords="on"
  plural="off"
  min="2"
  map="bucket=pail"
}%

You get (faked):

Plugin Installation Instructions

• Note: this plugin works on TWiki releases > 4.0 only
• Download the ZIP file
• Unzip it in your twiki installation directory. Content:

  File:	Description:
  data/TWiki/TagCloudPlugin.txt	Plugin topic
  data/TWiki/TagCloudPlugin.txt,v	Plugin topic repository
  lib/TWiki/Plugins/TagCloudPlugin.pm	Plugin Perl module
  lib/TWiki/Plugins/TagCloudPlugin/Core.pm	Plugin Perl module

<-- 

 Optionally, run TagCloudPlugin_installer.pl to automatically check and     install other TWiki modules that this module depends on. You can also do     this step manually.
 
 Alternatively, manually make sure the dependencies listed in the table     below are resolved.     None
 
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Plugin Info

<-- provided for compatibility only 

 Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = Renders a tag cloud given a list of terms
 
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-- TWiki:Main/MichaelDaum - 31 Aug 2006