1 Topic by andrew.duff

  • andrew.duff
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  • Registered: 25-10-2013
  • Posts: 12

Topic: 'Browse species' does not encourage browsing

Complete newbie to the new look NBN Gateway, so please forgive me if this question has been answered already in the forum.

I wanted to look up information for a species of beetle, so clicked on 'Browse species'. The page displayed was not exactly what I was expecting. It shows the first 25 of 107,216 taxonomic entries, apparently sorted in order of the number of records for the taxon, largest first. Click on the 'Last' navigation link and you find there are 4288 pages of information! Even allowing for just 3 seconds per page, it would take me over three and a half hours to browse all of the pages. There is no way on earth anyone is going to wade through this number of pages to find anything. Then I noticed the Groups dropdown listbox, and selected 'insect - beetle (Coleoptera)', which is my taxonomic group of interest. That's better, now there are only 6700 entries spread over 267 pages to wade through. Life is far too short even to do that so in order to find what I wanted, the 'Search' box has to be used. But of course this assumes that you already know (and can spell correctly) the name of the taxon. In any case, doing a search is not what I would call browsing.

Basically what I am saying is that the top-level 'Browse species' page as constructed is not fit for purpose. What I think is needed is simply a list of the higher taxonomic categories, i.e. the contents of the Groups dropdown listbox minus the 'All' option. Select one of these, say beetles, and you should be presented with the next level in the classification, which in the case of beetles would be a list of 103 beetle families. One other point, I never want to see an alphabetical list containing taxa at different levels e.g. species mixed in with families mixed in with subfamilies - that is just plain confusing.

Andrew Duff
West Runton
Norfolk

2 Reply by Graham French

  • Graham French
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  • Registered: 23-05-2006
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Re: 'Browse species' does not encourage browsing

Hello Andrew

The number of taxa in the table is too large to browse and does require searching on the required name. The search functionality does not require typing in the correctly spelt name but filters and orders the list as you type in the name by best match with the top matches at the top. It also allows searching on species code (first 2 letters of the genus and 3 letters of the species) and also searches on the words separately (eg try the first 3 letters of the genus with a space and then 3 letters of a species).

The list mixes taxa at different levels, as well as scientific names, synonymous names and common names so that it can be searched using any name present in the species dictionary.

On finding the required name of the taxon, clicking on the name goes to the information page for that taxon (each page is for the preferred scientific name). At the top of the page is the taxonomic tree for the taxa with links to higher taxonomic levels. For example clicking on the genus leads to a list of species within that genera each with a link to its own information page.

I have added your request for an initial more browsable taxonomic tree functionality that does not rely on a search functionality

Best wishes

Graham
NBN Technical Liaison Officer

Graham French's Website