CoralNet's blog
We've just launched this development blog for CoralNet! From now on, we'll use this blog to introduce new site features, significant site changes, or other CoralNet related news.
It's a very simple blog system, and we'll use the Google Group forum to boost its usefulness: every time we make a blog post, we'll also create a corresponding Group thread where anyone can discuss or ask questions about the blog post. This also means that if you're subscribed to the Google Group, you'll be notified when we make a new blog post.
You can access the blog index by clicking "Blog" at the bottom bar (footer) of any page on CoralNet. You should also see links to the few most recent blog posts on the CoralNet home page.
Note that we'll still send direct emails (to all registered CoralNet users) when making the most important site announcements, but the more routine updates will now go to the blog.
Label browsing update 1: Labels may be marked as duplicates
We've been working on several updates and features recently thanks to a grant from NOAA, including a couple of changes to label browsing.
We previously introduced the concept of verified labels when we launched CoralNet Beta. Now, labels may also be marked as duplicates of other labels.
We always prefer that people use existing labels that suit their needs instead of creating duplicates (two labels that semantically represent the same thing). However, we have over 4000 labels on the site now, and finding everything you need among those 4000+ labels can be a difficult task. Inevitably, some people create duplicates.
There are a few reasons why we want to mark duplicates. On the user side, as the number of duplicates increases, it gets harder to browse the label list, and creating a label-set for a new source becomes a more confusing task. We hope that marking duplicates will help people narrow down their choices. On the deep learning side, having two labels that refer to the same thing hurts the accuracy of our machine classification system. If the machine can treat duplicate labels as the same label for learning purposes, the accuracy should go up.
Like the verified labels, marking labels as duplicates is up to our label-set curators. However, if you do notice a duplicate that hasn't been marked as such, please feel free to contact us.
If your source currently uses a label which has been marked as a duplicate, don't worry too much - we will not (and never will) delete labels that are still in use. Eventually, we want to encourage people to migrate from duplicate labels to verified labels, but there isn't a convenient way to migrate a source's annotations yet. Hopefully we'll address that in the near future. Until then, our main hope is that people avoid duplicate labels when setting up new sources.
Label browsing update 2: Label list filtering
We've added multiple search filters to the label list page:
Previously, we only had the name-search box. Now you can also filter by label status (verified, duplicate, regular), filter by functional group, and apply a minimum popularity requirement.
Note that labels marked as duplicates are hidden by default. Click the 'Duplicate' checkbox to see duplicates as well.
For the moment, these additional search filters are only available on the site-wide label list page, and not on a source's Add/Remove Labels page. We wanted to fast-track this addition to the label list page to help our label-set curators mark the most prominent duplicates. If these label list filters prove to work well, we'll certainly add them to the Add/Remove Labels page as well.
You can discuss this article on the forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coralnet-users/FZ47AKYqwsE