AfricanLII: subject-area case indexes / collections

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Examples:

• https://africanlii.org/environmental
• https://africanlii.org/commercial
• https://africanlii.org/humanrights

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These are taxonomy-driven listing pages.

Effectively, each subject area is the top-level entry of a multi-level taxonomy. For example, "Environment" has "Air and climate" and "Fauna and flora" as child entries (and they too have children). Fundamentally, the user is doing a faceted listing of documents within the taxonomy. They can choose additional taxonomy entries (under the primary one) to facet by, as well as other facets like country and year.

The top level of the taxonomy becomes a detail page for that collection. It may have a rich description of what the collection is about, an image, external links, funders, etc (ref #584).

If the user is reading a document that is part of a collection (particularly if it's part of only a single collection), it should be obvious to the user and we should help them explore other documents in the taxonomy.

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Proposal

We have a single taxonomy space, so effectively the top-level must anchor separate logical taxonomies. eg:

• Collections
  • Environment
  • Air and climate
    • Climate change
  • Fauna and flora
    • Frogs
    • Trees
  • Commercial
  • Human rights
• Topics
  • Climate change
  • Land reform

"Collections" and "Topics" are two independent taxonomies.

We create detail pages for taxonomies. The pages for the first levels provide an entry point to their children, and don't list documents. Subsequent levels do list documents.

Taxonomy overview pages

• add a URL for /taxonomy which shows the entry points into the separate branches of the taxonomy system.
• add a URL for top-level taxonomy entries /taxonomy/<slug> that don't show documents, but do show all the taxonomy entries under the top-level one

Taxonomy detail pages

• add a detail URL for second-level taxonomy entries /taxonomy/<slug>/<slug> which shows an overview of that taxonomy entry AND lists all documents in the taxonomy (eg. /taxonomy/collections/human-rights)
• use #584 to be able to associated rich descriptions with the current taxonomy entry; it would be cool if we could have a banner image for each topic which is shown at the top of the page to theme the taxonomy
• the document listing page includes filter facets on the left as normal
• above the filter facets block is the taxonomy tree, allowing the user to drill down further into the taxonomy

Taxonomy tree

The taxonomy tree above the facet list is the primary navigation through the current taxonomy. If we're at /taxonomy/collections/human-rights, then the top-level heading in the taxonomy tree is 'Human Rights', and we're showing everything beneath that.

The taxonomy is shown as a nested list. The user can expand/collapse as necessary (we could use our la-table-of-contents widget). When the user clicks on an entry, it loads a new page which is the detail page for that entry.

In other words, it's not a facet like the filters, but just a collapsible list of links.

rough mockup:

Document detail pages

• show taxonomy metadata on the document detail page (example below)
• the links are clickable and take the user to the appropriate taxonomy page

Example: