COMR

Digital Archives are digitized collections of historical data, made up of various topics, events or people. Prior to digitization, archived material were stored physically and were only available for inperson viewing. Digital archives are an approach to making this historical information publicly and widely available through the internet. Generally, the content stored in these archives are simple in nature, yet their contexts and relationships are not clearly defined among them.

We conducted a feasibility investigation to assess the user experience and seek feedback on its design from the evaluation’s participants. Based on the results of the investigation, it was noted that the tool worked, was comprehensible and usable, but lacked aesthetic features or additional interactive points. In conclusion, we demonstrated that a tool for viewing interactive concept maps is feasible to implement, comprehensible, and useful. With minor tweaks, it can be embedded into a practical setting.

MASH is made up of two major features; the Complex Object Creator and Editor (COCE) and the COMR. COMR depends on COCE’s outputs to render concept maps and supplementary information. COCE is used to create maps and the supplementary information for each object on the map. COCE then converts this into a serializable format that COMR is able to process and display as an interactive concept map.

Components of COMR

Flask Framework & MongoDB Atlas

COMR is served using the Web Server Gateway Interface convention through the Flask microframework. Data persistence is served through MongoDB Atlas, a cloud database-as-a-service platform. This houses the serialized concept map data created by users on COCE.

Database-API

The Database-API serves as the Model component. It contains the logic for accessing, reading, updating and deleting items in the MongoDB Atlas database. It is written in Python. COMR uses this to retrieve concept map data for displaying via its Controller

Controller

The controller is a high-level abstraction of the various functions that make up the server-side processing for retrieving and sending concept map data to the client. The controller is comprised of the ConceptMapHandler and ConceptMapPackager.

ConceptMapHandler

The ConceptMapHandler uses the Database-API class to get JSON formatted objects from the Database. This is activated once a User requests to view a map. The ConceptMapHandler will receive the request from the ClientInterface, retrieve the requested map from the database and return the JSON map object to the client. Maps are rendered on the client-side and not server-side. When a user selects an object to explore on the concept map view in COMR, a request is passed to the ConceptMapHandler that then in turn serves the page for which the extended details of that object can be shown.

ConceptMapPackager

The ConceptMapPackager is activated once a user requests to view a map offline. It clones the view the ConceptMapHandler will generate and compresses the resulting outputs into a .Zip file, which is then sent to the user as a downloadable file. Both viewing options are accessible from within COCE’s dashboard, where a user requests to view a project. The ConceptMapPackager’s trigger is activated by navigating to a path on the domain where MASH is located and entering a query string that contains the ID of a concept map to trigger a downloadable file.

ClientInterface

This is the "front-end" of COMR. When a user requests to view a map, this page is rendered. It uses embedded data provided by the ConceptMapHandler. It is written in React, a Javascript Front-end library. It is comprised of the Vis.js Graph Library, the Metapanel and the IndexView.

Vis.js Graph Library

This feature renders the JSON object received from the ConceptMapHandler. The JSON object is stored locally, and the map is generated locally as well. It is done so through Vis.js, a Javascript library used for diagramatic visualizations.

Metapanel

This panel contains a control for changing between the Map and the IndexView, which will be discussed in the following section. On a node click, the Metapanel displays the clicked node’s title and brief description, with a button to allow the user to continue to view the details if desired.

IndexView

The index view is a textual list representation of the concept map. It uses the embedded data stored in the browser to create the list. The list allows for nodes to be searched through its titles and its brief descriptions.
The search feature allows 3 ways of searching:

(1) "contains" search: which will check if the node’s description or title contains the phrase. Ramsamy
(2) "equals" search: which will check if the node title or description exactly matches the phrase.
(3) "startsWith" search: which will check if the node’s title or description starts with the phrase.

DetailsRenderer

Each node carries its own details data. This details data is constructed by the user in COCE and is stored in an HTML format within the JSON object. This data is then embedded into a details page, by means of a Javascript insertion. Each node will have its own details page generated on the web-server when a user requests to view a map itself. This is done by a function call to a python script that sequentially embeds each node’s details into a predefined template. In the online view of the map, details are displayed as separate pages.In the offline view of the map, details are displayed inline on COMR rather than as separate pages.

Online View

Offline View

A questionnaire was made to assess whether this tool is usable, understandable, and feasible to implement in a realistic setting. This questionnaire asked participants to complete a list of tasks that made use of COMR's features, they were then asked to give feedback on these features.
It appears that the experience of using the tool is positive and usable. Each section in the questionnaire had a median score of 4 or above, indicating that the participants found COMR a usable and understandable experience. Qualitative participant results can be found here. The table below shows a comparison of median scores across the sections.

USE Questionnaire Results

We approached this by conducting a feasibility investigation with 3 specific objectives. Based on the user evaluations, we conclude that it is feasible to implement technically, by demonstrating a working and usable prototype. End users largely understood created outputs, being the concept maps with its corresponding node supplementary information and the interactive points, such as the clickable nodes and details pages, were comprehensible and useful. While these objectives were met, it does not mean that the developed prototype was perfect. There is room for improvement such as implementing features and ideas mentioned in results and findings. Due to the lack of target user participation in the evaluations, we were unable to assess specifically if this would be a good platform for mapping cultural heritage content, however we can assume that the platform is understandable and usable in a context that is not domain bound. Improved aesthetics of COMR should be considered as future work as this was a desired improvement as supported by the evaluations. This could also negate the "basic" feeling some participants reported. The download function can be redesigned, to allow for the downloaded view to mimic the online view, unlike the current inline display of details implementation. This can be done by generating the details pages on the client-side rather than server side, or, redesigning COMR to allow for statically embedded resources rather than dynamically inserted resources. Aside from reported participant feedback, collaboration features would be beneficial to teams of users and support for other device platforms such as mobile devices.

Shared resources can be found here