projects > tagline generator - timeline-based tag clouds

Tagline Generator - Timeline-based Tag Clouds

Tagline Generator by Chirag Mehta is a simple PHP codebase that lets you generate chronological tag clouds from simple text data sources without manually tagging the data entries.
Once you have populated the data source and configured the generator, it makes a list of all the unique words that have been used and counts how many times each word is used. Next it identifies the different variations of words and combines them under the most common variation using the Porter Stemming Algorithm. E.g. "promised", "promises", "promising", and "promise" might be grouped under "promises".
Then it removes the most common words like "the", "and", "this", "that" and some not so common language-specific words like "hitherto", and "notwithstanding". Once the commonly used language-specific words are removed, it makes a "tag cloud" in which the more commonly used words are shown in bigger font size than the less frequently used ones. Additionally, it tries to figure out how long ago a given word hit its peak usage and brightens the recently used words while fading away words haven't been used in a while.
If none of this makes any sense, I recommend viewing the live demos listed below to get the idea.

Live Demos

The dynamic slider control is copyrighted to Erik Arvidsson, 2002.
The Porter Stemming Algorithm - PHP port by Richard Heyes is used to find root word for variations.

The Tagline Generator is released under the Creative Commons license.
While I use code and algorithms from various sources, I always respect the code license and give credit where it's due. If you think that I am using your code/algorithm without the appropriate license, please let me know.

Download Tagline Generator from the link above.
Organize your data as [header, body] and populate the demo.xml file
Edit the generate.php file and customize it however you want
Copy the entire folder to your web server
Set chmod 777 for the folder so it is possible for generator.php to create new files
Go to generate.php on your server and it will create demo.html
Go to the demo.html on your server to see how it looks.

For help and documentation on how to use the Tagline Generator, view the source-code of generator.php file and check out the readme.txt file.
Due to time constraints, I cannot write detailed documentation for Tagline Generator. However, feel free to email me for further information, technical questions, ideas, improvements etc.