GSoC ’18 with Intermine — Week 3
It has been three weeks since the commencement of the GSoC ’18 Coding Phase and a lot of progress has been made till now. The project has been deployed here.
This week has been really very productive. I have worked upon several parts of the application this week. My main focus for this week was to add filters into the application. But I ended up with some more cool stuff here ;)
Let’s have a look at all of them one by one.
- Search Rating/Relevance Score
Relevance score is a value which is calculated by the Intermine QuickSearch API endpoint for every keyword which is searched. This rating determines how much relevant is the result item with the search keyword. The QuickSearch API response provides a floating value of ‘relevance’ parameter. Intermine uses a formula for determining the Search score in the specific Intermine Search Portals. I have used the same formula to convert the floating relevance score into a score out of 5. The formula is here:
=> Math.round(Math.max(0.1, Math.min(1, relevance)) * 5)
2. Different colors for different Categories in Results
This was a feedback received from the Intermine community after my previous blog post. Having different category results shaded in different colors helps in exploring the results easily. At times, there may be a long list of result items returned by the application. Then having separate colors for separate categories helps us to explore faster. Our eyes are meant to perceive colors more quickly than text.
3. External links to reports
Every result item has a link which opens the result report on its particular Intermine portal. This report page contains more detailed information about the result item. On clicking the icon, a new tab with the given result report opens in the browser. The result link is generated dynamically:
4. Metadata about search results
Having metadata about the results returned is always handy at work. Every tab in the application loads a set of metadata as attached above. This can certainly help in understanding the presence of a search term in the mine in a unified way.
5. Search/Relevance Score Filter
With addition of score/relevance in the application, it was very much necessary to add an option to filter the results based on that. This section provides radio buttons to filter out the results based on the relevance score of the result item. I hope this feature will be extremely beneficial for the community members out there. :)
6. Category Filter
Every mine contains data from various diverse categories. So, this feature too was a necessary requirement of a full fledged searching tool. This section is loaded dynamically based on the types of categories returned by the API. The application uses the search result metadata received from the API to generate these category checkboxes dynamically. So, we need not worry about hard-coding any of these.
So, this was all about this week. Almost everything in the application is mobile optimized and ready to use. I would love to have feedbacks from the community members. Most probably, I will also be extending the scope of this project and add a REST API service for searching multiple mines. So, the project will be a full fledged Cross Intermine Search Tool in future, i.e. a package of, a client driven search interface & a back-end REST API service. Please have a look at the application here. I would love to have more feedbacks from the community. Thanks for reading. Happy Coding! :)
