Research infrastructure Inventory Database for EPOS All the ideas and discussions
1 vote Vote

Search on several countries

I think it would be valuable to make a filter which allow several countries. This is useful for getting regional overviews etc.

Eg. for the Nordic case: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland so show five countries at the same time and getting statistics on RI types etc.

Louise , 27.02.2012, 15:26
Idea status: completed

Comments

animamea, 28.02.2012, 08:32
This is a very interesting feature.
But I need you help to think about the drawbakcs it can have.

At the moment, the idea of the filters is that you filter something with the first filter, then in the subset of RIs you filter with the second filter...and so on.

This is basically an AND operator (example: "give me back the Ris in germany AND belonging to wg6")
Of course the results are empty if you write country:finland and country:italy, because there are not RIs which belongs at the same time to italy and to finland.

A workaround is possible: you plot the data of interest for all country, then you export in excel (I'll do it soon) and select only the nation of interest.

Of course we can implement the search to have also the possibility of making search with the OR operator. This means you could write country:italy OR country:germany and you have both RIs from Germany and italy.

But my question is: is it too difficult for an ordinary user? The also have to understand the difference between OR and AND.

Of course we will make tutorials, but I reckon that the use of this tool should be straightforward.

What do you think. PLease tell me your impresison/ideas.
D
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Louise, 28.02.2012, 13:32
I see your point in the difference in operator.
However, for the users and for the management I think it is very valuable to search regional.

Take for example the stakeholders questionnaire e.g. I am pretty sure there will be region dependent answers given to this. (Why should countries without mining suggest mining etc. ...)

For a more practial use, if/when station locations of e.g. seismographs are available in the database, you can choose regional or several countries and sort for this.

A more simple (first step) could be do define regions, where we have predefined the regions (e.g North, South, East, West and central Europe). However, this splitting gives other problems, especially when a user is interested in the boarder regions...

I think with a good explanation (and that is anyway needed) it will work.

Maybe a solution could be to build in buttons saying "and"/"or". The user then has to clarify the search option, when searching in the database. I think also implementing the buttons (or simply writing and/or) will make the function of the database more clear for the user?

Does that sound like an idea/feasible.
L
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animamea, 28.02.2012, 15:13
Hi L.
Thinking a little bit i suppose that the best is:
1) setup tutorials on RIDE use
2) add a 'searchtype:AND/OR' tag, which by default is 'searchtype:AND' which allows to perform the research you request.

Does it make sense to you?

bye
D
Reply
louise, 29.02.2012, 13:39
IHi D,

I think it makes sense.
It does however, depend on how visible this search option is on the page.
In general I do think, that adding this botton will make the search filtering more seethrough for the user, and therefore be an advantage, since it will (hopefully) make the user reflect on how the filter works.

- L
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animamea, 02.03.2012, 12:07
Hi Louise,
the function has been implemented.
Now we have 'searchType':'ON/OFF'.

So I can close the task.
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