[openbiblio-dev] Frontend issues with bibliographica.org

Thu Aug 5 09:18:43 UTC 2010

On 10-08-05 09:16, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> Just wanted to quickly note some minor issues I found when browsing
> around bibliographica the other day:
> 
> * Front page says 0 works, 0 persons etc in db but clearly not true
> (do a search ...)

This is fixed -- is there a ticket for this I can close? ;)
The home controller was simply not counting anything

> * Add does not work

I'm still not really sure how to handle this. I discussed
it a bit with MikeChelen in IRC yesterday. One option is
to have hand-crafted forms that walk you through it. This
is probably the best way. Because otherwise the underlying
structure gets exposed to the user and they'll have very
little chance of getting it right; they would need to
make separate graphs/resources for each of author, work,
manifestation, publisher and several different aggregations
for different views of the things, link in the lenses, etc.

Web forms. Ugh.

An alternative approach (please bear with me, it's
Interesting) is to have them describe what they are
trying to add in natural language (simple natural
language) and parse that. I've had some success managing
to parse things people say in IRC, going so far as to
build syntax trees out of it using NLTK. I think if the
grammar is kept relatively simple it should be possible
to turn that into RDF. If this works we can just give
them a text box that they can type stuff into...

> * No pagination on search results

Search results are paginated, you have to select a larger
result set. This is a bit counter-intuitive and not the
way searches usually work: normally you want to set the
size of the pages and not the entire result set, so 20
should be results per page, not results total...

> * Are there really only 20 changesets?  http://bibliographica.org/changeset

It looks like this is the same as above. Really there are
many more, what we want is the same sort of paginated
results...

> * Changeset links do not work

The reason being that the links hit the changeset controller
not the graph controller and it is the graph controller
that would display them... If you strip off the first part
of the url and only leave the part after the uri= it should
work.

However on my web browser at least it takes a *long* time
to display some of them doing the rendering in JavaScript,
I suppose because changesets are *big*

One thing to try, because we don't really want to support
editing of changesets anyways, is to special case changeset
requests and use the python fresnel renderer.

> * Front page intro is dull and should either be removed to about page
> or moved down the page (and I wrote it!)

:P

I'll try to think of something better to write here.

-w

-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK

RDF Indexing, Clustering and Inferencing in Python
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