More Organised Gallery

[StuartDH]

We're currently testing ways to organise the gallery to enable groups of species to be found more easily, based on keyword searching.

For instance, by clicking on the link below you can view the gallery entries that have both keywords 'blue'+'flowers'

Blue Flowers

This means that you also get a few rogue results where it may not be a blue flower - however, it shouldn't be too difficult to find a workaround for this.

Basically, we've been wondering what sort of keywords we should use to make searches more efficient. Starting with wildflowers, what would be your main search criteria for identifying a flower.

Colour is an good one, and where we have a bluey+pink flower we can easily make it appear in both pink and blue categories. However, height could give us a few more problems because it will need to be a vague height like 'tiny' or 'small' rather than 5mm or 4cm. Other groups could include habitat, flower type, petal shape and population, but if you've got any other ideas then we'd really like to hear them.

It'll be quite a big job to set up the gallery like this and we're keen to get it right first time, so any suggestions will be gratefully received.

Cheers

Stuart

[Spankerbuoy]

Height and spread are quite important characteristics! Better to have absolute measurements than abstract descriptive text, but if the latter is necessary then have a pop-up box accessible from the search page that holds explanations of the ranges covered by the various adjectives.

Steve.

[fbcpmike]

Originally Posted by StuartDH

Basically, we've been wondering what sort of keywords we should use to make searches more efficient. Starting with wildflowers, what would be your main search criteria for identifying a flower.

For me I use height rarely as it depends on the growing conditions and wether the plant is in it's right habitat, Eg some Mallows can be 15cm hight or 100cm, I'm not saying discount it, I don't usually use it.

I go for colour, # petals and petal shape, flower shape, then flower arrangement (singles, doubles, umbels, etc), then leaf shape and colour.

[wildone]

Oh dear Stuart it doesn't quite work. I used your link and it included Ivy flowers and Holly flowers. The association being Holly Blue Butterflies the caterpillers of which feed on both plants. Wildone

[StuartDH]

Yeah, that's why I mentioned the 'rogue' results in my first post. The simple solution is to name the keyword 'blueflowers' (all one word), in the same sort of way as the 'rarebirds' keyword in the other thread.

Here's a link to yellow flowers that have been tagged with the keyword 'yellowflowers'. None of the images in the gallery that have 'yellow' or 'flowers' (or both) appear in the results, only the 'yellowflowers'

Yellow Flowers

[Tinkerbell]

Just a suggestion - if blue flowers were the keywords, for reference, and the comment about the Holly Blue butterfly were moved down to quick reply, instead of being in the description of the flower, would holly still come up as a blue flower?

Those of us who get stuck in to volunteering on the site, could check such things every few days to make sure the rogues are moved. What do you all think?

[StuartDH]

'blueflower', 'yellowflower' etc act more like unique codewords, that will only show up where they intended to be. The problem with using everyday words like 'blue' and 'flowers' is that they'll always show up in descriptions that are totally unrelated.

We could sift through the results pages and get rid of the ones that we don't want, but their will eventually be hundreds (maybe even thousands) of results pages and it'll be a big job to keep an eye on them all.

[wildone]

Sorry Stuart, just did not read through the whole of your original post. However it makes it clearer to all now the wording in the 'keywords' for each image.

[fbcpmike]

Originally Posted by StuartDH

'blueflower', 'yellowflower' etc act more like unique codewords, that will only show up where they intended to be. The problem with using everyday words like 'blue' and 'flowers' is that they'll always show up in descriptions that are totally unrelated. .

Stuart, I think this may relate more to how the search function is coded and how it is used. Citing for example Google, within their search you can use text within parenthesis for a text string Eg

"Holly Blue" or "blue flower", and you can use + or - preceeding a word (or parenthesis) to force inclusion or exclusion Eg

+"blue flower" -holly -butterfly, gives blue flowers without Holly trees or butterflys.

Is this some thing that might work or be possible with the search facility?.

[StuartDH]

Hi Mike,

We've had a look at the various search options available to us and it seems as though all produce the same problem in that all of them have the potential to produce rogue results, unless each group is given a coded search term.

Because keywords like "blueflowers" don't exist in the english language, we immediately remove the errors from the search results like "this is a picture of a our pond at blue flowers primary school"

However, unique keywords enable us to group all blue flowers, even if they're not the main subject of the photograph, or even in the flowers gallery. A bee on blue flower in the insects category will be able to get in to the results, simply by adding 'blueflowers' to it's list of keywords.

I've spoken with some programmers that specialise in taxonomy and searching and they agree that unique keywords are the best way to go.

[wildone]

Hi Stuart, thought I would try a search on 'gull'. Great apart from Flamborough which perhaps is OK anyway. The other anomaly was Monkey Flower - Mimulus
gullatus. I did find that if the search category is restricted to Birds then only gulls show. Ciao Wildone