Context Term Tidier

Tidies taxonomies that contain a mess of unrelated terms by using AI to move terms to more appropriate taxonomies.

Author:Robert Andrews (profile at wordpress.org)
WordPress version required:3.1.0
WordPress version tested:5.2.20
Plugin version:1.0.0
Added to WordPress repository:13-10-2019
Last updated:13-10-2019
Warning! This plugin has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
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Many WordPress installs suffer from cramming hundreds or thousands of varied taxonomy terms in to a limited number of ill-suited, all-purpose taxonomies (eg. the default “categories” and “tags”).

These are better off split in to dedicated taxonomies. For example, storing “Bill Gates” and “Microsoft” terms in “tags” is not optimal, because one is a person whilst the other is a company.

There is no straightforward way to split up existing taxonomies more granularly in this way, except for labour-intensive and manual, technical effort. So, many WordPress installs continue to suffer from not having created granular taxonomies intentionally at the outset.

Term Tidier tidies up messy taxonomies like these automatically. It uses natural language processing and knowledge graph technology to determine the real entity type of existing terms, then re-assigns them each to a more appropriate, alternative taxonomy.

How it works

Term Tidier uses Google Cloud’s Natural Language Processing features via API calls.

Users set a “source taxonomy”, the taxonomy they want to be tidied up.

For each term within that taxonomy, Term Tidier calls Google Cloud to examine the term name, aiming to return a determination as to its true “entity”.

The plugin receives one of eight “entity” type determinations from Google Cloud – UNKNOWN, PERSON, LOCATION, ORGANIZATION, EVENT, WORK_OF_ART, CONSUMER_GOOD or OTHER.

For each entity type, users specify a target taxonomy to which a matching term will be moved. For example, you can map all terms found to be a “LOCATION” to your own “Places” taxonomy, if it exists.

For each term in the source taxonomy, if a particular entity was determined, Term Tidier moves the term to your corresponding taxonomy.

Usage

Use Term Tidier from the WordPress Tools menu (Tools > Context Term Tidier).

The plugin page confirms your settings as set in Settings, displaying the taxonomy and terms which will be examined.

Click the “Tidy Terms” button to execute the operation.

Term Tidier will cycle through each term, seeking an “entity” determination and re-assigning any terms possible.