Ontology tree widget

[joncison]

From @matuskalas on December 2, 2015 16:45

A thread for gathering & discussing requirements for improving the usability of the ontology tree widget

Copied from original issue: bio-tools/biotoolsRegistry#5

[joncison]

From @matuskalas on December 3, 2015 0:50

In contrast to the very convenient and pretty rest of the bio.tools GUI, the ontology tree widget and the whole Function tab are super inconvenient to use, to the extent of hampering extensive annotations.

Points for improvements follow, most of them regularly re-appearing as oral suggestions from various tools annotators.

Selection of multiple concepts at once

Hide the tree widget after done and going to another one

And open again when clicked.

Show properties of the concept on hover

At least: definition, primary label, internal synonyms, related concepts (via relations including generalisation).

Enable fully expanding the whole subtree

Using a different type of click.

Usability optimisation of the filtering

Note: awesome that deleting the filter string keeps the tree open as is, just adds the previously hidden concepts!

Some brainstroming for further analysis, design, optimisation:

• analyse the plentitude of examples of other contemporary ontology tree browsers
• search for concepts separately, show in a popped-up dropdown (gmail|ncbo style)
• highlight found concepts instead of hiding the rest (search instead of filter)

Add synonyms into the search

And later also relations between concepts, maybe also definitions, comments, etc.

The whole Function tab in the bio.tools registration interface needs a visual clean-up

And probably at the same time a corresponding data model fix (NB. bio-tools/biotoolsSchema#2).

Otherwise very hard to see where a user is looking. Input? Output? Input format? Another function?

[joncison]

From @matuskalas on December 3, 2015 0:51

Please comment on the above, add +1s where applicable, and add further ideas.

[joncison]

@matuskalas - many of these features are captured in the new Tool Annotator function - the thing we designed at the DK hackathon, which I then mocked-up and which @hansioan did an excellent basic implementation (not yet integrated into bio.tools).

I assign this to @hansioan to pick up on