MediaWiki / a civic wiki as the vocabulary manager for your ____.
The New York Times divides tags into several groups:
(Des) = Descriptive subject terms assigned by Times indexers (subject headings)
(Geo) = Geographic locations
(Org) = Organizations (includes companies)
(Per) = People (persons)
We can do the same thing using a civic wiki.
You’ll need four categories: Subject Headings, Locations, Organizations, and People (we’ve already got people on Arborwiki). Doesn’t look like adding more complexity will be helpful.
Use the MediaWiki API to export each category as a list in whatever format you need. CSV, JSON?
The modify your publishing software’s tagging system. It probably has an auto-suggest feature. Use the API as the data source for the auto-suggest instead of the built-in tag list.
There you have it — a central database of important things that can be publicly negoitated by everyone who uses it it.
You don’t have to have a turf war over whose tags are the best (Your newspapers? Mine?). This makes it easier to track subjects over time — the same phrases will describe roughly the same things across local websites.
You can also automatically pull in the B-Copy from the wiki using the tag.