[seek-dev] Re: new screenshot

Wed Jul 14 16:56:59 PDT 2004

MAtt, Chad:

I cannot see the "additional screenshots". Nothing in my inbox and I
don't see it here either:

http://www.ecoinformatics.org/pipermail/seek-dev/2004-July/thread.html#741

help!

Bertram

>>>>> "MJ" == Matt Jones <jones at nceas.ucsb.edu> writes:
MJ> 
MJ> Hi Chad,
MJ> Thanks for the additional screenshots, Chad.  I'm not sure which one 
MJ> works best. I do think the Actor/Data separation in tabs is good from a 
MJ> usability perspective even if it isn't strictly necessary from a 
MJ> classification perspective.  Particularly telling is that, even in your 
MJ> example, you would use different concepts to organize data than you do 
MJ> actors, so the disctinction occurs very high up in our concept space.  I 
MJ> think most scientists will make a strong distinction here (see below).
MJ> 
MJ> Also, I agree we should eliminate the slider altogether - it will 
MJ> probably be confusing.
MJ> 
MJ> The question of whether to use a) one tree with instances in the tree, 
MJ> or b) two panels where the first tree filters individuals in the lower 
MJ> list, is the hard one.  In (a) we can't really combine categories 
MJ> easily, so you are stuck with looking at the actors in a single 
MJ> category, which can be limiting and means you might have to expand lots 
MJ> of folders to find what you are looking for.  But the UI is very 
MJ> understandable. In (b), you have a tree used as a control in a way that 
MJ> is not typically done, so we need to be sure the increased query 
MJ> functionality (e.g., abillity to select multiple properties at once) 
MJ> justifies the hit on intuitiveness.  Also, (b) will likely suffer from 
MJ> screen real-estate problems.  The single panel onthe left already seems 
MJ> too small because we frequently want to see 15+ rows of actors or even 
MJ> more for data.  Making 2 panels just makes it worse.
MJ> 
MJ> Ultimately I think we should be presenting these design choices to 
MJ> users.  For starters getting Deana and Samantha and other SEEK 
MJ> participants to comment on the 3 screen shots would be useful.  Towards 
MJ> this end, I showed your screen shots to Ginny Eckert, a quantitative 
MJ> ecologist (and my wife), and here's her perspective:  1) definitely 
MJ> separate data and actors in two tabs -- ecologists just think this way. 
MJ> 2) for the browse view, only use one pane for the tree, as the two 
MJ> panels are just too confusing.  Its not clear at all how it works. Move 
MJ> any advanced querying (e.g., find all numerical simulations that are 
MJ> also static) into a separate advanced query dialog. 3) Eliminate the 
MJ> slider -- she thought it might be useful, but probably too non-conventional.
MJ> 
MJ> Some other stuff she comented on too: 4) The main workflow display MUST 
MJ> have scroll bars, and the panning control should/could be moved to a 
MJ> dialog/floating panel so that the tree has more real estate. 5) Ginny is 
MJ> very used to using menu driven systems for selecting the statistics to 
MJ> be used ona set of data. Her process for this type of app is 'Open the 
MJ> data, select stats from hierarchical menus, configure stat, run'.  See, 
MJ> for example, SAS Analyst.  So, she says that having the 'models' in the 
MJ> tree on the left is really non-intutitive altogether, and those 
MJ> hierarchies really should be menu items.  I'm not sure if we can 
MJ> accomodate that view, but she felt pretty strongly about it.
MJ> 
MJ> So, in conclusion, I would probably vote for something akin to your 
MJ> 'actor-ontology-search-without-list-with-tab.jpg', but also remove the 
MJ> slider from the bottom, and add an advanced query dialog that parallels 
MJ> the data query dialog and allows easily creating advanced logical queries.
MJ> 
MJ> Cheers,
MJ> Matt
MJ> 
MJ> Shawn Bowers wrote:
>> 
>> Comments interspersed ...
>> 
>>>> It isn't immediately clear anymore why the slider is there... I 
>>>> thought the reason to have it was to be able to, within the directory 
>>>> structure, "collapse" a set of nodes so that you can, e.g., see all 
>>>> the individuals (actors, datasets, etc.) under a directory or any of 
>>>> its subdirectories, without having to navigate through to the 
>>>> subdirectories themselves (i.e., the subdirs aren't directly shown).
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> OK, (imagine for a second that the slider is actually on 3 (note the 
>>> slider may also just be divided proportionally, in which case 2 could 
>>> equal level 6, 3 level 9, etc.), where it should be).  You now see 3 
>>> levels of the tree.  Note that there are no '+' symbols next to the 
>>> behavioral, functional or static folders.  Now, if we move the slider 
>>> to the right one notch so it's on 4...+ symbols would appear next to 
>>> behavioral, functional and static (if they actually have children) and 
>>> you would be able to browse there.  I actually now think that this 
>>> slider makes more sense when the results are integrated in the tree, 
>>> but I still think it's useful with the list view.
>> 
>> 
>> I agree that the slider doesn't make much sense unless you only have a 
>> single tree view. Otherwise, you can just use the capabilities of the 
>> tree view directly (with the other window) as I mentioned in the other 
>> email.
>> 
>> Actually, I still think having two separate panels -- one for the tree 
>> w/ individuals and concepts, and one for listing selected individuals -- 
>> and no slider is the best way to go. Selecting a concept in the tree 
>> displays all individuals under that node, i.e., the individuals in the 
>> current concept, the individuals in all the subconcepts, and in their 
>> subconcepts, etc.  Selecting multiple concepts in the tree view displays 
>> the union of those selected.   Individuals can be selected and placed in 
>> a workflow, e.g., by dragging and dropping from either panel.
>> 
>> My main problem with the slider is that it is "unconventional". It isn't 
>> a standard kind of user interface widget used with trees.  It adds an 
>> extra level of complexity that I don't think is needed. And, it isn't 
>> immediately clear, without playing with it a bunch or reading some 
>> documentation, what it does or what it is for.
>> 
>>> There are not supposed to be directories...sorry for the icon, i just 
>>> copied the "data" icon from kepler.  Those are intended to be 
>>> individuals.
>> 
>> 
>> OK. My mistake -- it does look a little different than a folder icon.
>> (A better icon would be the canonical cylinder disk, but okay.)
>> 
>> 
>>>> I think what you are proposing with actors is very simple in terms of 
>>>> ontological information, and doesn't apply directly to Rich's 
>>>> ontology.  The notion being exploited in your screenshot is 
>>>> assignment of a controlled-vocabulary-style keyword (with some notion 
>>>> of subconcept, or narrower-term/broader-term) to an actor.  The 
>>>> ontology is trying to extend the more eml-ish approach of describing 
>>>> what is in the dataset, so that we can do some automatic processing 
>>>> with it.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> What do you mean by "Rich's" ontology?  This is just dealing with 
>>> organizing the models/actors/etc in kepler.  I thought Rich's ontology 
>>> was the full on ecology ontology that would probably be used to 
>>> classify data only.  Am I missing something here?
>> 
>> 
>> I was under the impression that Rich was the only person actually 
>> working on ontologies for SEEK.  Also, there has been some initial work 
>> on representing models and actors using the same framework, so it isn't 
>> solely for data.
>> 
>> My point is just that to do something similar for data (and possibly for 
>> actors), more thought needs to go into how to get the concepts that 
>> would be useful for this browsing interface.  The ontology being created 
>> does not consist of a set of keywords -- it consists of concepts defined 
>> in terms of their interrelationships, which sometimes can get pretty 
>> complex.  This was the reason for my comment below.
>> 
>> I think your actor-ontology-search-without-list-with-tab.jpg image shows 
>> this well.  The concepts that show up in the tree are pretty much 
>> hand-picked terms that make sense to an ecologist for finding data (as 
>> opposed to all the various concepts that exist within an ontology, or 
>> even a controlled vocabulary but that is another story). If you just 
>> took all the concepts of the ontology and created a tree -- I don't 
>> think it would be that helpful for the kind of browsing interface being 
>> proposed.  Also, there might be useful data-level items that could show 
>> up as a "directory", e.g., a particular species name, or a particular 
>> biodiversity index, etc., so that has to be taken into consideration as 
>> well.  In general, I think we need a good way to pick out the 
>> appropriate terms from the ontology that are best suited for this style 
>> of browsing.
>> 
>> shawn
>> 
>> 
>>>> The difficult thing is defining concepts so that they can capture the 
>>>> purpose of the structural description of a dataset, that EML provides 
>>>> -- which is what enables integration, e.g., or the ability to apply 
>>>> automatic conversions, etc.  The concepts, however, I wouldn't 
>>>> necessarily consider as keywords per se ... although it may be 
>>>> possible to infer or extract keywords from the dataset directly based 
>>>> on the semantic "registration", or possibly to extract keywords from 
>>>> the ontology.
>>>> 
>>>> A while ago, Rich and I also discussed an approach for taking a 
>>>> keyword list (either user-defined or some "standard" list of terms), 
>>>> and letting a user define the terms using the ontology. (Rich uses 
>>>> something simple for this in his FoodWeb work.) Then, you could 
>>>> "automatically" construct a structured controlled vocabulary of the 
>>>> terms from their definitions (automatically, assuming you did the 
>>>> work of mapping terms to ontology stuff).
>>>> 
>>>> Right now, the best way to get keywords for datasets is probably to 
>>>> extract them directly from detailed parts of the ontology (for those 
>>>> parts of the ontology that reflect "keywordy" information, like 
>>>> subclasses of Observable Entity Properties or Observable Entities, 
>>>> etc).  But, the concepts defined within the ontology are probably 
>>>> higher-level than what one would consider as keywords. For example, 
>>>> the concepts "Observation," "Time," "Location," and so on, don't seem 
>>>> like they would be very useful keywords to browse for datasets ...
MJ> 
MJ> -- 
MJ> -------------------------------------------------------------------
MJ> Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
MJ> http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
MJ> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
MJ> University of California Santa Barbara
MJ> Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
MJ> -------------------------------------------------------------------
MJ> _______________________________________________
MJ> seek-dev mailing list
MJ> seek-dev at ecoinformatics.org
MJ> http://www.ecoinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/seek-dev