09 July 2009, 17:47

Roadmap item: http://wiki.mahara.org/Roadmap/Tagging_&_Searching

Status: Under development

Ifthere's anything that strikes you as important on the Tagging & Searching page,feel free to mention that here - it will help us prioritise work.

If you're able to contribute funding, expertise, ideas/concept sketches etc. - let us know!

25 August 2009, 22:25

The University of Luxembourg have expressed interest in making improvements so that users can use their own tags. Currently within Mahara, users can enter tags, but cannot search on them. Also, the self-search capability is rather ancient and does not work well. They are proposing roughly the following:

• Swap the "Search My Portfolio" box for a tag cloud
• Add a page that shows a tag cloud and results (of any kind - artefact or view) that match the selected tag(s?). If possible, this page could show the results with title, description, link etc.
• Every where that an artefact is displayed (e.g. when looking at a blog), show its list of tags. The tags should be linked if the user is looking at their own content.

Does anyone have any feedback about this? Any suggestions for small things that might improve this plan further, without completely changing the scope of the work?  

25 August 2009, 23:47

Hi Nigel

Something you may want to consider is to have some sort of limit for the type of resources being displayed in the search results.

A user may want to limit the results to display only blog post, views, files, images, own content , etc that match the selected tags rather than everything.

25 August 2009, 23:49

Hi Nigel,

I'm happy if we can enable and disable "Tag cloud" block on "Configure site > Site options" page.

And a setting for the number of tags showing on  "Tag cloud" block, if we can have.

 Mits

26 August 2009, 1:23

I like the idea, but I would not abandon the good old search text box. Tag clouds are still an alien concept to a lot of customers we come across. I would prefer for the 2 to co-exit.

Alex - Synergy Learning

26 August 2009, 15:40

Hello,

Great suggestions!

@Alex: We (the funding party ) don't want to get rid of the search box completely. A tag cloud and a search would be great. However, as far as I understood it, creating the search is more difficult than developing the tag cloud. That's why the tag cloud came up. Better to have something to search the portfolio with than nothing at all. Currently, I am struggling to explain the search box that doesn't do anything (at least on our installation).

If somebody else wants to fund the search box development, that would be fantastic. We already have a few feature requests pending (I need to update that to include the tag cloud and developments on the improvement on the feedback) that we are discussing in more deteail with Nigel and Richard at the moment. 

Kristina

26 August 2009, 2:25

I would very much welcome the enabling of searching / aggregating by tags and tag cloud in Mahara.

These features will have far reaching benefits for education and training and would enable people to pull together information related around a particular topic (ie unit, module, subject), making tracking what you've done so much easier.

Tags are a great way of 'finding' and 'managing' information, and the Tag Cloud helps 'paint a picture' about a person.

I've been encouraging people to use the tag facility in Mahara, in hope that when it does work, they will have a powerful tool to search and share their information.

I'm wondering if it would also be possible to have an RSS function out of Mahara on these tags and/or an RSS function on tags into a 'view' to improve the way people share information (as a push technology).

Many thanks, Allison

26 August 2009, 21:39

Another problem is that we currently have tag input boxes on group views and files, but there is no way to search on group-owned things yet.  The "Search My Portfolio" box only looks in the user's personal portfolio.

I imagine it will take us some time to implement searching across group portfolios, so I think we should remove the tag input fields on group views/files until such time as the search works.

28 August 2009, 5:42

Hello,

Please find a summary of this discussion plus a few mockups for the tag search here. I have submitted that document for Nigel's and Richard's further perusal and as basis for the development of the feature.

If you want to make any additions, please post them here in the forum.

Have a nice weekend

Kristina

30 August 2009, 17:41

  Looks good with the filters - more filters could be added at some stage such as by person, blog.

Something that may be nice to have is to select the order the search results are displayed in. The following orders may be useful

• by date as the most  recent resources may be preferred to be found
  
• alphabetically - so easy scanning of resources can be done.
• by rating - probably out of scope at this stage but  maybe for the future.