I've been struggling with the XML export/import for two days, trying different methods, googling, searching drupal.org forums and so i've come to a conclusion that this is beyond me. I have come to beg for help. My experience of xml is for very basic tables and stuff, mostly flash item tables, my experience with spreadsheets, excel, visual basic is non-existant.

I am building a very broad database of plants for a climate monitoring institute and they have requested an ability to spell out taxonomy of plants: genus, species, cultivar in excel or any other spreadsheet to be uploaded/backed up every now and then.

Considering that some species, for example, the Norway Spruce (Picea abies) has over 2000 cultivars - it would be a nightmare to write it all in, I have not even started to speculate how many cultivars there are going to be altogether in the end.

For a start, logically, I've started with samples and the main files in the taxonomy_xml directory.

Excel>new document>developer>source>xml maps>add> (and i browse and select taxonomy.xsd in the main folder)
there i see a "vocabylary map" on the right hand side. Straight away if I attempt to "verify map for export" i encounter a warning message saying:

"vocabulary map is not exportable because it contains the following:
denormalized data"

After hours and hours of searching for an answer i can see that there are a lot of people having a similar problem, what more, most people on the forums tend to provide inadequate answers, blaming excel for being too complicated to the point that even the provided samples by MS will not be importable/exportable in xml format. I've tried OOo and another free tool for xml conversions and failed miserably.

My question bores down to this:

How do I use taxonomy xml import and export in coherence with a spreadsheet? Is there a way? How would you recommend for me to go about it? If not, is there a way i could map up the required terms (taking into account hierarchy) for them to be importable/exportable. What tools do use to work with the files? What am I doing wrong? Am I missing something blatant and obvious to the point of embarrassment?

You would be surprised by the lack of information on this topic on the web. Taxonomy xml is even more complicated than an everage question and google keywords tool (i work with SEO) tells me that there are globally over 100,000 searches a month for "xml excel" which is over a million annually, i've written this question in hope that those people would be able to find an answer here.

I would be very grateful for any answers and links. I am aware that this is not exactly a technical drupal module issue, however I am pretty sure that others like me a somewhat dischevelled by the problem.

Dmitry

Comments

dman’s picture

dman CreditAttribution: dman commented

First, I have zeros knowledge of the tool you describe, I have never seen or heard of Excel - xml_maps. Though it sounds very relevant to the large amount of taxonomy research I've done several years ago.
found formats

Second, a large amount of the work done on this module was directed towards "real" scientific taxonomies - plants, genotypes and things like that, (especially the 'sharing of it) so you are looking in the right place. Encyclopedia of life "lifedesks" for taxonomy management

I'm not sure what your question is though.
Ignore 'taxonomy.xsd'. That was written in the early days of XML, and represents a deprecated, Drupal-only format. It won't help. The current preferred format is SKOS-like RDF.

Excel exporting to 'XML' is not a silver bullet to making your data re-usable. The question remains about the XML schema used etc. I don't know what the recommended next step is there. Yeah, if there was a working xsd file, that probably would have been a step in the right direction...

If you are getting out of your depth with XML, and are planning to maintain the source data in Excel spreadsheets anyway (not structured XML) then you may be better sticking with CSV-like syntaxes as an archive format.
taxonomy_xml supports a couple of CSV formats, and http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_csv offers good support and a nice interface for that also.
You may also look into Taxon Concept Schema (TCS) from TDWG, as that is specifically modeled for academic-level biodiversity-type information. taxonomy_xml attempts to read TCS formats, but does not output it. I've not been inspired/sponsored to take that further recently
If you get hold of TDWG-TCS-v101.xsd - I think it's in the TCS standard referred to above - that could be worth a shot.