[deepamehta-devel] [Feature #3055] Better handling of result sets (was: "Reveal More")

admin at berlios.de admin at berlios.de
Fr Aug 1 10:30:43 CEST 2008


Feature Request #3055, was updated on 2007-Jan-15 22:27
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Category: None
Status: Open
Priority: 9
Summary: Better handling of result sets (was: "Reveal More")

By: x28
Date: 2008-Aug-01 10:30

Message:
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Could you please discuss the more far-reaching wishes 
(such as depth issues or semantical properties) in a 
different feature request, and decide about my very 
BASIC wish of facilitating the mere VISUAL aspects?
I don't want to select items 8 through 150 semantically 
on a one-by-one, but accelerate the revelation to just 
see them and then cognitively process them afterwards. 

As I wrote below, DeepaMehta's unique selling point is 
to accommodate all 3 modalities, including the visual 
one (on the left pane). But again and again, the 
naturally different preferences of the developers tend to 
skew the weights towards the functionalities that are, 
IMO, better covered by other products, such as 
Freebase/ Thinkbase. 

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By: jri
Date: 2008-Jul-30 16:59

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Yes, for the moment revelation of result sets is cumbersome for 2 reasons:
1) It is very unhandy (requires a lot of mouse action) to reveal topics one-
by-one from a context-sub-menu.
2) The menu provides no hint which topics are revealed already.
Furthermore usability-tests have proven it is not reasonable that, after 
searching, another operation is required ("Show Result") to actually see the 
result (at least in case of result sets with more than 7 topics).

I'm not happy with the idea of "reveal 7 more" as discussed here because 
this operation is "semantically empty". In my opinion it must be up to the 
user to decide _which_ topics of the result set are relevant to his/her work 
situation. In order to support the user to do so, there are 2 requirements:
1) a permanent visualiziation of the result set.
2) a possibility to reveal items from the result set very quickly.
Furthermore an indication which items are already revealed might be 
helpful.

I'm about to implement a solution within 7 days. My current conception 
goes like this:
- the "Show Result" command is dropped
- instead the result set is listed in the property panel (the search topics, 
tons, get a new HTML-property: "Result")
- all items in the result set are rendered as hypertext links
- clicking a link will reveal the topic (as before)
- topics alreay revelaed should be marked some way in the list

One further issue remains to be discussed: what about large result sets? I'm 
tend to retain the limit of 150 items. Larger result sets are not visualized, 
but a message that filtering is required.

A detail: a search topic (in fact any topic with extensive content) should 
remember its property panel scrollbar position.


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