Place-name standardisation tool - changed UI
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Adrian Bruce said: Just seen that the Place-Name Standards tool (on https://www.familysearch.org/research... ) has changed.
At first glance, the search box seems to be more permanent and to have more space to work with - so that's a plus, because it always seemed too small and to get itself lost.
I'm not fond of the apparent loss of the tabs - they're still there but only a line says that it's a tab. Why??? I can imagine people not realising that the tab facility is there and / or not knowing which tab they're on. Introducing new User Interface concepts is always dodgy....
The odd (and important) part is the way that the Search Box pops up (or doesn't) suggestions in the list below as you type. If you take my home town of "Crewe" and type just that, you get 6 places across time-and-space called Crewe. What you don't get is "Crewe Green" or "Crewe by Farndon" (no hyphens by the way)
In both cases, you need to type every letter of those similar but different names, i.e.:
- you don't get "Crewe Green" after typing "Crewe Gree", you need to type the lot;
- you don't get "Crewe by Farndon" after typing "Crewe by Farndo", you need to type the lot;
I am sure that the previous version would do suggestions on partial typing - this version won't, which is a bit of a **** if you're not wholly sure what the (first node of the) full name is.
At first glance, the search box seems to be more permanent and to have more space to work with - so that's a plus, because it always seemed too small and to get itself lost.
I'm not fond of the apparent loss of the tabs - they're still there but only a line says that it's a tab. Why??? I can imagine people not realising that the tab facility is there and / or not knowing which tab they're on. Introducing new User Interface concepts is always dodgy....
The odd (and important) part is the way that the Search Box pops up (or doesn't) suggestions in the list below as you type. If you take my home town of "Crewe" and type just that, you get 6 places across time-and-space called Crewe. What you don't get is "Crewe Green" or "Crewe by Farndon" (no hyphens by the way)
In both cases, you need to type every letter of those similar but different names, i.e.:
- you don't get "Crewe Green" after typing "Crewe Gree", you need to type the lot;
- you don't get "Crewe by Farndon" after typing "Crewe by Farndo", you need to type the lot;
I am sure that the previous version would do suggestions on partial typing - this version won't, which is a bit of a **** if you're not wholly sure what the (first node of the) full name is.
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Adrian Bruce said: I wonder if they were trying to avoid the detritus that comes with partial matching part way through typing?
The problem is that unless you type the full name exactly as per Standard (or exactly as per one of the Alternate Names already in the system?) you might not see what you need???? I didn't try all variants of what to type. Certainly at no point was Crewe By Farndon suggested to me until I had typed the lot. So what would have happened if I got the last part slightly wrong? I don't know, I didn't try..0 -
Juli said: Ugh, this is definitely a serious disimprovement. It used to be that regardless of what did or didn't come up in the drop-down, if you just entered the partial placename and hit "search", it'd bring up all of the places that included that bit of text. Now I have to type out the full Balassagyarmat -- all the way to the final T -- in order to get anything besides something in Nigeria.
Very Serious DISIMPROVEMENT. Please, FamilySearch, revert this as soon as humanly possible, because it renders the places search interface asininely stupid.
(Yes, asininely. Or worse.)0 -
Jordi Kloosterboer said: I do like how I can see all the places on the map almost instantly, though. That is fun. But, the searching needs to go back to what it was or better. And of course, it needs to have better responsive-design as can been seen by the not-so-good design on my phone (the no results shown and language buttons without backgrounds do not feel so good on the phone).0
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Jordi Kloosterboer said: Eh, and it doesn't show the "Show within this place" feature anymore...0
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Adrian Bruce said: I'd just like the Search on partial typing reverted - the size and placement of the box is an improvement to me, as I said. But the loss of partial search is ... a complete ****.0
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Adrian Bruce said: I missed the loss of the "Show within this place". Its loss is another bad idea.0
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Jordi Kloosterboer said: Oh, that's what that is lol. Thanks:)0
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Juli said: I wish FS weren't so eager to embrace mystery meat navigation quite so wholeheartedly.0
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Adrian Bruce said: But that's an icon with a normal meaning about navigation on a map (eg, take me to my GPS coordinates) - it's *not* got a meaning anything like what it's been used for!!!0
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Jeff Wiseman said: Exactly! Why do we keep having unrelated symbols hijacked to be use in a FS specific way--especially when it's nothing at all like how it is used everywhere else.0
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Adrian Bruce said: The Blog item for this new version of the tool is on https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/...
1. So far as I can see, while it shows screen shots with the "compass" icon, it fails totally to mention that this is now where you find "Within This Place". Admittedly, there is a tool-tip that pops up saying "Places Within" but exactly why should I hover over icons that have perfectly understood meanings, just in case FS has programmed them differently? Sorry, but the "compass" icon refers to things like placing on maps - on Google maps it means "Centre the Map at my Current GPS position".
A better icon for "Places Within" would have been one that looks like a list.
2. In respect of the search for similar names, the blog does mention "use a tilde (~) to search for similar spellings". Thus I can type "haslingdon~, england" and get a list including those 2 perennial confusions of "Haslingden, Lancashire, England" and "Haslington, Cheshire, England". However, you still need to type every letter before you can add the tilde. To take Juli's example, partial typing and entering a tilde - "Balassagyar~" (vice "Balassagyarmat") - returns no answers in that case.
All in all, I don't think the tilde facility is anything like as useful as automatically searching on partly typed items.
3. The blog item says:
"Research Links
"Below the History section of a selected place, you will find the Research Links section. These links connect to outside websites with place-focused information. For example, WhatWasThere.com pins historical photos of the selected place to Google Maps.
"Another research link you should use is Search for Records for This Place on FamilySearch.org. Clicking that link will search the FamilySearch historical records."
Guys - the link Search for Records for This Place on FamilySearch.org simply is not there on the examples that I checked.0 -
Jeff Wiseman said: Regarding the tilde:
At least the "*" wildcard still works. "Balassagyar*" will correctly find "Balassagyarmat". In fact "Balassa*" will find Balassatanya, Balassa, Balassagyarmat (and its earlier form of Balassa-Gyarmat)
On computers though, for well over 45 years the tilde has been used as an identifier for a person's home directory in their file system. So are you telling us it is now some kind of brand-new wild-card symbol?0 -
Adrian Bruce said: Tilde is, it appears to me, the opposite of marking a check-box for "exact search". In this facility, the default for a place-names search is exact. You have to switch that off.
Err - so why not just use "exact search" check boxes as in the rest of the system?0 -
Juli said: Um, so, they've introduced a new wildcard? That only sort of works? And isn't documented anywhere on the page where it applies? (Nothing new in that last bit, of course.)
FS needs a new mantra pasted prominently on every developer's and product manager's screen somewhere: IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT.0 -
Jeff Wiseman said: It appears (from the blog) that it is not really a "wildcard". It appears that the places tool may have tightened up the spelling criterial since most names that you enter are going to be "real" (as opposed to names in searching indexes where any number of misspellings can occur). If this is the case, then there would be a need to tell the tool when to look for alternate SPELLINGS of a name on occasion.
This actually does look like a reasonable (but typically "undocumented-in-the-tool") approach. It obviously has some (also undocumented) nuances. For example, it seems to presume that the preceding text is always a full name. It's function does seem to be getting around questionable spellings when you know about them.
So with what might be a tightening up of spelling accuracy for searches in the standard places database, there would now likely be a higher need for the correct use of wildcards. This doesn't bother me as overall it could be an improvement--time will tell.
But it does raise a couple of questions for me:
1) Is the standard "?" wildcard usable as well (it should be)?
2) Can the use of wildcards and the alternate spelling flag (i.e., the tilde) be usable at the same time (it should be)?
3) Will item #2 actually produce coherent results (it should)?
4) The last issue does perplex me a bit. If there really has been a tightening up of the search criteria (again, in this application probably desirable), then why if I type in "Chillicothe" do I get 12 exact hits and 8 hits that seem to have absolutely NOTHING in common with "Chillicothe"? (It appears that this behavior should NOT be happening. Maybe these are alternates or something. Hard to tell)
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Jeff Wiseman said: So if while in the tool, I click-and-hold on a portion of the map, it sets one of those geo-coordinate markers. You can do a "places within" a radius of that spot. It's like placing a map-pin icon using when other tools. So that function is at least consistent within the tool.
Also, it will show you the actual coordinate values for that point.0 -
Adrian Bruce said: Oldtown has alternate names of Old Chillicothe and Chillicothe.
Frankfort ditto
Westfall ditto
Indianola has an alternate of Chillicothe
If you understand Citations to Sources like "Online - Gazetteer, NGA_US, 1064673", you could presumably check. I can't understand them!0 -
Adrian Bruce said: Yes but "places within" a radius is not - as far as I understood - the same function as "Show within this place".
"Show within this place" was supposed - I thought - to show subsidiary places. Naturally they were usually close on the map.
"Places within" a radius is a different function altogether - it's places close on the map, but which might be under a different jurisdiction, not subsidiaries.
Thus Newark NJ might be within a radius of New York City but is not "within NYC" in what I thought was the old sense.
So - have I completely misunderstood what the old "Show Within This Place" did?0 -
Jeff Wiseman said: Ok, great to know! Thanks!0
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Jeff Wiseman said: I don't think so. The geo marker seems to be a bit more than the map-pin icon that confuses folks in the dual name system of FSFT. In the FSFT, the pin simply says it has a geo-coordinate (usually in the MIDDLE of the place). But in this tool when showing next to a standard place name, it seems to indicate that it ADDITIONALLY has a set of coordinates identifying an area for the place. In the case of a place name, it is the full "Place". When the place is a single coordinate (like a drop pin), it's area is defined by a radius that you must manually enter.
It sort of makes more sense when you look it up in google maps. When you search for a city, township, or village, the Google Maps shows it to you with an outline of where its boundaries are. Even though the Places tool uses Google maps and therefore benefits from the boundary definitions that Google has, it doesn't have the ability to show those boundaries right now.
That would be a great improvement in the Places tool that I know I would use a lot. Right now I have to bring up Google Maps for the boundaries in a separate window and the Places tool for the standard names in another, and then switch back and forth between them. Frequently a place name such as a cemetery is NOT within the city limits that Find a Grave lists it in.0 -
Jordi Kloosterboer said: ... The improve this place feature has disappeared... Neveremind, it only shows up if you are signed in :P0
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Gordon Collett said: NGA stands for National Geospatial-Intellegence Agency.
You can access their database of places at:
https://geonames.nga.mil/namesviewer/...
Click on the search box on the left of the row of options. Go down to the advance search options and put the number, including any negative sign in front, in the Unique Feature ID box to find the entry.
I haven't found it terribly useful other than seeing that this must have been one of the sources for the original load to the Places database.
There doesn't seem to be an entry for 1064673.0 -
Adrian Bruce said: Thanks Gordon - I'll try again later - right now it's sulking ...0
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