Future Plans
Heurist is in a period of very rapid development funded by several major projects which need to harvest metadata and put databases online as public websites with intuitive search and mapping functions. This page describes some of the major new features in our immediate development pipeline.
In Beta
- Tablet data entry. We have worked with the FAIMS infrastructure project to provide seamless configuration of their Android tablet data entry app from a Heurist database structure, bypassing their manual configuration methodology and facilitating field/archive/museum data collection.
- Workflow improvements. Informed by user feedback and observation, we are actively working on workflow improvements to guide new users and improve usability. Recent improvements include an updated report generator, simple/advanced mode switch on record editing screen, choice of record type icons from a built-in library and detailed schema listing and database health checks.
In Alpha
- Modularised components. Easy construction of customised web interfaces with mix and match choice of layout and components. End users can choose interface themes and language from the user profile menu.
- Faceted search. Easy wizard-driven setup and saving of multi-level guided searches into complex databases. Saved faceted searches can be published to the web allowing novice users to ask complex what-if questions of the data.
In Development
- Published templates. We are working with the FAIMS and HuNI infrastructure projects to develop and publish mix-and-match database profiles for a range of Humanities data, including archaeological, historical, performance and literary studies. 2nd quarter 2014 / ongoing.
- Harvestable XML. We are extending our XML generation to support harvesting by the HuNI aggregate and other harvesting services, as well as improved internal documentation of archive packages and XML output. 2nd quarter 2014.
- Advanced mapping. The mapping/timeline function is being rewritten to provide much greater control over layer display and symbology, drawing pathways between objects in temporal series and display of fuzzy dating. 3rd quarter 2014.
- Improved search. We have incorporated Lucene indexing and are now building an improved search wizard to allow easy construction of complex searches, fulltext searches and fuzzy matching. 4th quarter 2014.
- Network visualisation. Our new modular interface will provide full coordinated views including visual display of linked records and (probably) building of links directly within the visualisation interface (first quarter 2015).
