"Fixed list" of collectors / Herb

[lowfatspread]

At present we appear to get list of collectors/ Herbs generated under the small
navigation image which are replaced by a link to the wiki entry for one once its been selected.

wouldn't it be better if the list of the commonest collectors / herbs (and DET) could be static under the navigation window so that they could always be quickly selected without having to perform the search each time.

You could perhaps vary the "static" list by institution or project depending on the stats ...

the majority of the time i seem to be selected from a fairly restricted range
of names e.g. Augustin Ley, Howard Stuart Thompson, G S WEST. William West , Thomas Clark, Charles Bailey , Botanical exchange Institute, Watson Botanical exchange etc...


the wiki link i feel should be off the actual collector / herb entry
like you done with the google and os map links for place names...

Is there any information about the software/hardware/database upon which the project is running? Have you considered making the development open source?

keep up the good work
LFS

[Tom Humphrey]

Ideally the suggestion list should be opening quickly enough that it does not matter that it is dynamically generated. Are you finding it to be too slow at present? The advantage with generating it is that the suggested names can take a lot of contextual information into account, currently suggestions make use of:

Collection date - to avoid suggesting impossible names
Provenance (herbarium) takes into account other selected collector and provenance entries
Institution - the list is biased toward common collectors within a particular herbarium
Taxon - slightly influences the suggestions

this may be excessive complexity - if the results are coming too slowly to be useful, then it would be better to serve a less optimal static list. - with all the above it takes a lot of database queries to generate the list, as you may imagine.

There may be potential for major improvements possible for caching suggestion responses - something that currently probably rarely happens because there are too many possible permutations.

I've been delaying generating name suggestions for 'det' names until I've sorted out the other problems with that - the current system needs revamping to cope with multiple det names.

I'd also like to be able to generate some sort of locality suggestions - though I'm currently unsure exactly how that would work. For many species it should be possible to suggest probable counties (or at least rule out improbable counties). More speculatively it would be great to try to tie in altitude, climate and ecological data - but that's not even remotely planned at present.

I like the idea of moving the wiki link (though there is also the blue 'info' link that appears next to collectors - and links to their summary page). Ideally the wiki pages and the generated collector info pages will eventually merge.

I'll follow up your question about open source - which is an important issue, in a separate post, so that the message threads don't get too jumbled.

regards,

Tom

[lowfatspread]

The response i get to the generated lists of collectors does seem to vary a lot... over the weekend Saturday and Sunday i appeared to be gtting an almost instantaenous response, however yesterday and today its very
sluggish...