I'm currently working on project that involves moving a database of documents for court records and briefs over to a Drupal environment. One of the problems that we are faced with is how to index these documents.

In our court district, records and briefs all have a docket number which is assigned to a case. The interesting thing is that when multiple cases merge the docket numbers associated to the case become synonymous:

Case 1, documents have Doceket No. A

Case 2, documents have Docket No. B

If case Cases 1 and Case 2 merge, then Docket No. A = Docket No. B

My first inclination is to create Docket Vocabulary and have the terms of this Taxonomy be the docket numbers. I am hoping to take advantage of the fact that terms can be synonymous.

I understand that there are several functions in the Taxonomy module that I may be able to take advantage, of including:

taxonomy_get_synonyms
taxonomy_get_related

But I'm having problems convincing my collegues that this is the way to go, and frankly I'm not certain it's the right solution either.

If anyone has had a similar issue and can offer some guidance as to how to move forward, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks!

D

I've asked a related question (which I would also need to answer in order to move forward with this solution):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2656247/can-drupal-terms-in-different-taxonomies-be-synonymous