GSoC’18- Cross InterMine Search Tool (Progress so far)


It has been three weeks since the commencement of the GSoC’18 Coding Phase and a lot of progress has been made till now. The project has been deployed here.

This week has been really very productive. I have worked upon several parts of the application this week. My main focus for this week was to add filters into the application. But I ended up with some more cool stuff here 😉
Let’s have a look at all of them one by one.

  1. Search Rating/Relevance Score
The application knows what you are searching for 😉

Relevance score is a value which is calculated by the InterMine QuickSearch API endpoint for every keyword which is searched. This rating determines how much relevant is the result item with the search keyword. The QuickSearch API response provides a floating value of ‘relevance’ parameter. InterMine uses a formula for determining the Search score in the specific InterMine Search Portals. I have used the same formula to convert the floating relevance score into a score out of 5. The formula is here:
=> Math.round(Math.max(0.1, Math.min(1, relevance)) * 5)

2. Different colors for different Categories in Results

The world is colorful and hence our app too 😉

This was a feedback received from the InterMine community. Having different category results shaded in different colors helps in exploring the results easily. At times, there may be a long list of result items returned by the application. Then having separate colors for separate categories helps us to explore faster. Our eyes are meant to perceive colors more quickly than text.

3. External links to reports

Every result item has a link which opens the result report on its particular InterMine portal. This report page contains more detailed information about the result item. On clicking the icon, a new tab with the given result report opens in the browser. The result link is generated dynamically:

4. Metadata about search results

Metadata for BMAP mine (search: ‘brca1′)

Having metadata about the results returned is always handy at work. Every tab in the application loads a set of metadata as attached above. This can certainly help in understanding the presence of a search term in the mine in a unified way.

5. Search/Relevance Score Filter

Score filter on sidebar of the application

With addition of score/relevance in the application, it was very much necessary to add an option to filter the results based on that. This section provides radio buttons to filter out the results based on the relevance score of the result item. I hope this feature will be extremely beneficial for the community members out there. 🙂

6. Category Filter

Every mine contains data from various diverse categories. So, this feature too was a necessary requirement of a full fledged searching tool. This section is loaded dynamically based on the types of categories returned by the API. The application uses the search result metadata received from the API to generate these category checkboxes dynamically. So, we need not worry about hard-coding any of these.


So, this was all about progress so far. Almost everything in the application is mobile optimized and ready to use. Most probably, I will also be extending the scope of this project and add a REST API service for searching multiple mines. So, the project will be a full fledged Cross InterMine Search Tool in future, i.e. a package of, a client driven search interface & a back-end REST API service. You can find the project repository here. Please have a look at the application here. I would love to have more feedback from the community. (For providing your feedback/suggestions, kindly email me at dwivedi.aman96@gmail.com) Thanks for reading. Happy Coding! 🙂

 

GSoC Student Interview spotlight: Cross InterMine Search Tool + Aman Dwivedi

This is our blog series interviewing our 2018 Google Summer of Code students, who will be working remotely for InterMine for 3 months on a variety of projects. We’ve interviewed Aman Dwivedi, who will be working on the Cross-InterMine Search tool.

Hi Aman! We’re really excited to have you on board as part of the team this summer. Can you introduce yourself?

Heya! I’m Aman Dwivedi, a final year undergraduate student from Jabalpur Engineering College, India. I’m a web enthusiast and a Javascript lover (JS is love <3). I have worked with two startup companies as a Full Stack Node.js Developer Intern in the past. I’m also a proud member of the Mozilla Open Source Community (I have worked on the renowned Mozilla Firefox project). I have worked with many great programmers in the past and I’m extremely excited to work with the InterMine team.

What interested you about GSoC with InterMine?

I believe in the fact that a good open source community comes with its members sharing ideas and helping each other throughout. The sign of a good team is a friendly, yet productive environment. The best thing about InterMine is its team and its proud contributors. Everyone has a great helping attitude. The Application Phase was awesome, and I never had such a great experience in any of the past teams I worked with. Everyone is so much enthusiastic about new features and new implementations all the time. Also, one more brownie point is that my project work here will affect a very large scale of society (this is the most important motivating factor for me <3).

Tell us about the project you’re planning to do for InterMine this summer.

I will be working on the Cross InterMine Search Tool. This project will be developed from scratch. It will use the InterMine APIs and the registry to fire concurrent requests to all the selected InterMines for a search query. The project will be developed in Vue.js. It will have a great impact as currently there is no such tool which is capable of searching multiple mines at once. It will make life of all InterMiners and researchers very easy to search and browse through genomic data in all the InterMine instances.

Are there any challenges you anticipate for your project? How do you plan to overcome them?

The most important thing in the development of an open source project is the community. I will need suggestions and user reviews from the community to make the project better. My first priority is always the Community User experience. Suggestions will be really valuable throughout the project development, testing and the documentation phase.

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