Wednesday, November 16, 2005

The basic phase of the demo of KADIS

The task in this phase is mainly to collect the selections from the user and compose them into a query, i.e., try to figure out what the user wants. Based on the document provided by Keith, there are mainly two steps: the first step asks the user to make some selections to make up the final query, and in the second step, the user makes some decisons for the manner to display the results.
In the first step, there are five different selections for the query for the moment. All of these selections should present with a concept at the ontological level. That means, it should not have much to do with the detail of each dataset. Because different reseachers might use different ways to describe the same concept, it's hard for one user to understand others' notes for one concept without detailed explanation. We plan use XML files to organize all ontological information about the datasets concerned. (Note: the ontological information is kind of representation of concept which can be understood by most people in the field of archaeology.
  1. Dataset selection: all datasets existing in the collections are displayed in a checkbox list.
  2. Taxonomic level: a treeview plus checkbox is used to display the hierarchical structure of the taxonomic categories.
  3. FUI selection: it is connected with the selections made in 2.
  4. Element selection: a list box may be used to display all elements in the datasets.

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