I spent sometime last night working on the most important or at least most central page in arachadmin curation tool – assertion editing. This page, shown below, brings together assertions (behavior, publication, evidence) with the associated participants (taxon+anatomy, or substrate – living or non-living portions of the environment). It’s a bit of a mess as I smooth out the rough edges with my imperfect understanding of web2py and its forms, but I made a couple of improvements last night in the list of associated participants. The list now appears under the assertion form rather than the participant form. This change was facilitated by removing a couple of fields that are more properly in the (primary) participant; this shortened the form and freed up some space to move the participant list (and it seems more appropriate to group the list with its owner rather than one of its members). The other change is that the ‘pidgin functional owl’ description of the participant now has a link that redirects to the assertion page with the appropriate participant (and assertion) filled in. Prior to this the page was difficult to navigate without typing messy URLs with id values obtained by manually querying the database. That was sufficient for the first nine entries, but it clearly won’t be enough for the thousands to come.
An Arachnolingua Blog 