Hi Jie,

Please see my follow up below.
(BTW, did you remove the "SUGGESTION 5&6" from your tracking site? -
they are gone)

At 06:12 AM 6/1/2006, Jie Bao wrote:
>On 5/31/06, Zhiliang Hu <zhu@iastate.edu> wrote:
>>Jie and Peter,
>>
>>I added following feature requests to your tracking site. I copy them
>>below for reference of everyone:
>>
>>* SUGGESTION 5:
>>The main utility of the ATO Editor is to edit "relationships". At
>>the meantime
>>the Users wish to annotate the terms as well. Would it be possible that the
>>Terms "descriptions", "definitions", "Units", etc. be given a larger editing
>>window? I think this is a practically feature users want and it does not
>>involve much "ontology" works, but definitely adds value to it.
>
>It is already feasible using "details" panel. meta data such as
>"descriptions", "definitions", "Units" can be defined in the ontology
>schema and be specified for each ontology term.

I recall this is a feature we have talked about before. Perhaps I failed
to convey my ideas clearly :) What I am trying to describe is, users like
me are sometimes get confused, I am afraid it would not be straight forward
to convince new users that it's "easy to use" :) Okey, here I have more
details for the editing panels -- may I suggest:

1. Set the "line panels" as default, and fix the order of panels as:
   - Upper class
   - Class (term)
   - Lower class
   - Details
(floating positions is a fun but often confuse people ;-)

2. Delete "Node Statistics", which I see little use.

3. I don't see a "details" panel but there is a "Property" panel -- I guess
    this was what you meant.
  (1) Within the "property" panel, could you put a fixed table with
property/detail
      (filled when there is data; or an empty table otherwise).
  (2) Users are often lost as WHEN this can be edited. Could a button be
      added within this panel called "Edit" which effectively check out the
      related parts from database for editing? (I know you may argue about
      it but let's call if there is a disagreement ;-).

4. The "check out" function is not obvious to use (currently use "right click"
    on "Edit the package" (could this be changed to "check out for edit"?)
    I suggest a "check out for edit" button be placed on the "left button bar"

Actually to use the "left button bar" for most of the "right click" menu
would help Mac users a lot because Mac mouse has only a single clickable part
but I don't want to drag this too far at the moment :)

>>* SUGGESTION 6:
>>To open up channels for the ATO project to be portable to the community,
>>one would wish to easily download the ontology works for their own sake.
>>A utility may be very useful to export the current ontology into
>>(1) Flat files in the format of hierarchy; (2) SQL-ready format for database
>>upload.
>(1) The editor now support OBO format. Do you mean to support
>exportation as a tree in plain text?

Correct. This is for the novice users' sake (helps to get the community ;-)
Maybe Peter/LaRon can do this easily? It only needs some postgres SQL.

>(2) Could be. However, there may be some diffculties, since we use
>"oid" to indentify each term and relation, while oid is
>database-depedent. Since we can also import a OBO format file, the
>"upload" is already feasible.

What I have in mind is the GO download db tables format. But this is
a minor for the moment. We can add support to different formats as
we go forward.

One more -):

SUGGESTION 7:
There is waiting time while the editor is talking to a remote database.
During this "silent time" user often get confused as if the button clicked
"does not work", so s/he may click it again, or again, which adds more
network requests. Sometimes this waiting time can be quite long.

Can a pop up window, or an animated icon in the tab, be added to indicate
it's "talking to database" or "busy" during the waiting time?

Zhiliang
Received on Thu Jun 1 09:42:32 2006