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CATS-760 - Getting issue details... STATUS
Introduction
As the Clowder database becomes filled with metadata generated by a large number of extractors, it becomes difficult to search the generated metadata using the advanced search feature. Currently all of the user-defined metadata definitions get displayed in a drop down list by default and the remaining of the metadata fields (machine extracted metadata) are accessible via an autocomplete feature. If the user knows some of the metadata fields in the system, then it is possible to type in the first few characters and the autocomplete will help in listing the available metadata field definitions. Even with this, browsing a large number of metadata definitions is painful. If the user is provided a small list of metadata definitions (both user defined and technical) by default, It’ll help them to quickly select one from that list and search.
Purpose
The main purpose of this feature is to provide the admins with the capability to highlight a selected list of metadata terms (both user generated and extractor / machine generated) and provide them better visibility through the advanced search page.
Major changes needed:
- We need to have a page where the admin can add a set of commonly used or highlighted technical metadata definitions to the database. Currently there is a metadata definitions page being used for submitting user-defined metadata definitions and this page can be reused for this purpose. We can have two sections here - one for technical metadata and one for user-defined metadata.
- There is also a page to add user metadata definitions specifically to a space. We need to decide wether this page should also contain the technical metadata subsection or not. In any case, there should be uniformity in naming across all of these pages, after these changes have been incorporated.
- Adding the the technical metadata term should be simple. Since all of the information about the metadata term is available in extractor info JSON file, adding a technical metadata term to the metadata definitions can be as simple as selecting an item from an autocompleted list of items.
- We will probably need to create a new Mongo collection to store the machine generated metadata definitions. It’ll be empty in the beginning.
- Once the technical metadata term is added to the database, it should appear in the advanced search page in the default drop down list. The drop down list should be grouped as user defined and machine defined or technical metadata.
- If needed, display better names for the two kinds of metadata:
- For example, user-generated metadata and machine-generated metadata. Technical metadata probably do not convey the meaning properly since both user and extractor generated metadata can be technical in nature.