Talk:Materials

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• Bill Flanagan (OpenWetWare.org at MIT) 12:35, 15 April 2009 (EDT)Check out what we're up to regarding making the OWW Materials section more useful. Jakob Suckale brought this to my attention a while back. I've been working on a number of related enhancements to OWW to make upgrades to the way we enter and categorize information about them. The Protocols page does a better job at aggregating content. But it also is in need of improvements. Rather than presuppose tools, I'm interested in seeing how we can make them up as we move forward to get the most out of the members of OWW.

• BC 13:13, 4 June 2006 (EDT):I put together a template page for materials similar to the protocols template written by Reshma Shetty.

This is a proposed restyling of the materials page. I thought I would put it here to see what people thought before making it go live on the real page. Comments welcome. I just thought the page could be made more compact and easy to view. Feel free to retweak if you have a better idea. A similar thing could be done to the protocols page. My only concern is whether it makes it more difficult/intimidating for those new to wikis to edit? Which is definitely not what I want. -- RS

• Jennyn 16:58, 26 February 2006 (EST): The page has been restylized. Please feel free to edit as you feel necessary.

automatic link collection

The materials page unlike the protocols page still does not collect pages according to their tag. I think this is a very useful feature, since new materials pages would then appear here without an additional edit to the materials page. This should be set up for this page as well.

Best, Jakob Suckale 11:18, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Proposed Changes to Materials Page

Bill Flanagan (OpenWetWare.org at MIT) 11:40, 6 April 2009 (EDT)This is a good idea. We've discussed redoing the protocols page for a long time but to date it's still 'the same as it ever were'. I'll be glad to participate (i.e., provide technical assistance as needed) in the work if someone can help work on the requirements:

• What are the existing pages in OWW that would be related to materials?
• What would the best way to view and search these pages?
• How can we identify requests for information on materials that currently are not present in OWW pages?
• How can we provide a structure that encourages OWW members to participate in actively evolving this over time?

I would hope that what we would do for Materials could be applied to make protocols more user accessible as well.

Also, it's great to see someone using Talk pages; they're a pretty useful resource that we don't see a lot of people taking advantage of!. I'm still researching Southern blots to get back in the game after Jacob's last post to my talk page! Thanks for the comments, Jakob.

Bill Flanagan (OpenWetWare.org at MIT) 09:39, 15 April 2009 (EDT)

Material Category Tree Browser

This is a proposed mechanism for modifying categories and adding general taxonomy editing ==

This is a category tree of the current contents of the categories used in the Materials page. If anyone has suggestions about how this process can be streamlined, please add to the section at the end for process comments.

To start with, I think we could do some pruning to get the tree in better shape. That doesn't involve removing categories in my book. It does mean doing a better job connecting them together.

What I would suggest is to see if anyone can contribute their comments about how the existing set of categories can be changed. To do this, start by looking at the list and put entries below regarding what you would suggest needs to be changed. I'll come up with a more tructured way of doing this if I start to get input. I don't think it should take a lot of time to make this assessment. If it does, then I'm doing something wrong.

!!! PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE THIS CONTENT !!!

"Uncategorized" Material Categories

Please make suggestions about how the MANY materials listed below under the "Materials" category can be handled.

When possible, for now do this by either adding appropriate category tags to make them show up in the right place in the existing tree or make suggestions using the templates below to create or change the existing tree to better reflect them.

Material Search Suggestions

Currently there is no formal search for materials other than the one we use based upon the Dynamic Page List (DPL) extension. This has proved to be a valuable tool in the past but it may be time to look at a better way to do the searching. For one thing, it's a bit cpu-cycle consuming to search via the DPL. It's a very complicated extension that seems to have issues with the most recent versions of MediaWiki. I think we need to address this. But first we need to scope out the data that is to be searched and see if we can better collect requirements for search.

Keep in mind. We also will get a LOT of mileage out of better documenting the categories for OWW Materials. The richness of the content of these pages can be used to make suggestions of material. But we need an accurate and meaningful set of material pages and categories that we all buy into.

Moving Toward Standard Biological a Standard Ontology for Materials

If we were doing this as ignorant outsiders (like me, for instance!), this would be considered a 'folksonomy'. But this is not a group of IT people masquerading as biologists. You people can make a meaningful contribution by helping to structure a taxonomy that can eventually become a part of a formal ontology. If you have pointers to existing ontologies that would be helpful, please mention them and provide links to appropriate references as well. I'm not interested in reinventing the wheel and will jump at the opportunity to refactor the existing categories with biological standards used outside of OWW where applicable.

Category Information Template Page: Input required!

If someone wants to take a crack at editing the template for a material category page for all categories we have or may change or add, dig in.

We're using the material template page created by Reshma Shetty as a starting point.

Here's a pointer to a Category Template that we can star with. This won't be used until we reach consensus on the format.

Material Category Page Template

Like article pages, Categories are represented as pages that can accompany each category label. Although we have not used them extensively, they would be just as useful to many members as the 'leaf-node' pages describing the material.

Suggested protocol for submitting Changes to the Existing Materials Category Tree

If anyone contributes proposed, please think of using the following formats. Just copy and past them to the bottom of this page. Please DO NOT DELETE or CHANGE these templates. We will make the changes to the tree after people think they understand and like changes.

Copy the text between the START and END labels for each proposed change and paste it at the bottom of this page, THEN add your text.

Category Name Change

• Label for this suggestion:
• Related to Label:
• Author:
• Existing Material Category Name:
• Proposed New Material Category Name:
• Description:
• Comments:
• End of Change

END CHANGE

START ADD

Category Add

• Label for this suggestion:
• Related to Label:
• Author:
• Proposed New Material Category Name:
• Descending-from Existing Parent Category Name:
• Description:
• Comments:
• End of Add

END ADD

START DELETE

Category Delete

• Label for this suggestion:
• Related to Label:
• Author:
• Proposed Material Category Name to be Deleted:
• Description:
• Comments:
• End of Delete

END DELETE

Current OpenWetWare.org Material Category Tree.

Use the +/- labels to expand and collapse the categories.

<categorytree mode="pages">Material</categorytree>

Suggested changes initially will not be reflected in this tree. These are the actual working categories. If there is demand, we can add more interactive tree editing but let's use our imagination for now!

Proposed Changes to the Category Tree.

Please use the above entries to suggest changes to the category tree.

If we start getting a lot of traffic, I'll replace the current manual method with a more automatic version.

For the author field, just enter four tilde characters (~~~~) and your name and a timestamp will be inserted.

Example:

Category Add

• Label for this suggestion: Add subcategory of Restiction Enzymes
• Related to Label:
• Author: Bill Flanagan (OpenWetWare.org at MIT) 09:23, 15 April 2009 (EDT)
• Proposed New Material Category Name: Custom
• Descending-from Existing Parent Category Name:Restriction Enzymes
• Description: These enzymes are not part of catalogs but have been created by vendors on a one-off basis.
• Comments: Many more are now available. It may be useful to reference vendor in some cases.
• End of Add

Material Page Maintenance Process Suggestions/Comments

Please make any suggestions here for changing the process we're proposing/crafting. If we use standard formats during this process, we can both handle suggestions about process as specific changes are made in the hierarchy.