Frequently Asked Questions
You can find more detailed help by visiting the help system, which is also accesible from Heurist itself. You can also always get in touch with us directly, and we will do our best to resolve your trouble.
Create a Heurist database (free institutionally-supported services)
These free services are kindly supported by Intersect Australia, Huma-Num (France) and contributions from users.
Use our servers in Australia →
Use our servers in France →
Getting
Started
Can I run Heurist without setting up my own server?
Can I run Heurist on my own server?
Can I run a local version of Heurist on my own computer?
What does it cost to use Heurist?
Is Heurist free and open source?
Yes, Heurist is free and open source. We publish our source code to Github. And we provide free hosting for smaller projects, meaning you can use one of our free servers and access Heurist through your web browser. If you have a larger funded project, you should consider running your own server: contact us for advice.
Who supports and maintains the development of Heurist?
Heurist was originally developed by Dr. Ian Johsnon, within Sydney University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Today, Ian leads and international team of developers and advisors, under the supervision of a Technical Steering Group. See People and History & Background.
Sustainability
What happens if Heurist ceases to be developed and/or supported?
Can I get my data out of Heurist if I want to use another system?
Yes. Heurist can export selected data or the entire database in various formats including CSV files, XML files, and custom output formats generated through a built-in templating system. Heurist data can also be accessed directly through MySQL using a standard set of documented SQL queries, as all Heurist databases are standard MySQL databases (the world’s #1 Open Source SQL server database) and all share exactly the same structure of tables and fields. The data in any Heurist database can thus be accessed and exported in a coherent and usable form independent of Heurist through standard MySQL queries which can be used in a variety of database tools such as the MySQL command line, MySQL Workbench, PHPMyAdmin, or practically any programming language. Files and images are stored unmodified on disk in a separate directory for each database,  and can be accessed with normal disk management tools (e.g. SSH Secure Shell or WinSCP) for downloading from a Unix server to a desktop. See Sustainability.
Can I transfer my database easily from one server/service to another?
Heurist has an option to dump the entire contents of the database to a Zip file which you can download. You will then need someone familiar with the Unix command line to reload this data on the new server following the instructions below. The process is not complicated and should take only a few minutes. The full manual process, which some people will prefer, is as follows: 1. Transfer the database: Dump the contents of the MySQL database to an SQL textfile using the mysqldump utility (include the –routines parameter), then create the new database on the new server and reload the dumped file (create database hdb_xxxx; use hdb_xxxx; source xxxx.sql;) 2. Transfer the file data: copy the contents of the database folder (identified by the name of the database) from the HEURIST_FILESTORE folder on the source machine to the equivalent folder on the target machine. Then set the ownership to nobody:nobody. See Sustainability.
How sustainable is a Heurist database?
Extremely sustainable. Heurist databases are actually MySQL databases with identical, well-documented structure. MySQL is the world’s number one SQL server database and is likely to be readable for many years. Heurist databases will remain readable and the data will be usable, without the need for Heurist, as long as MySQL is around and backwards compatible. See Sustainability.
Can I access data in a Heurist database without using Heurist?
Since Heurist databases are MySQL databases with identical, well-documented structure, the data in any Heurist database can be accessed and exported in a coherent and usable form independent of Heurist, through a standard set of documented SQL queries.
Is my data secure in Heurist?
Yes. All your data is password-protected, and you can manage who has acess to which parts of your database using Heurist’s Admin menu. All information is communicated through a secure https connection. We have never experienced any data losses or cybersecruity breaches on our current servers. While we cannot offer a premium security service, we are happy to advise you if you choose to host Heurist on your own server or cloud service.
NB: In 2021, numerous Universities have had a problem with their https certificates. You may recieve an error telling you your connection to your Heurist database is insecure. Please be assured there has been no security breach. We are pursuing the problem with our server administrators.
Who else is using Heurist?
Dozens of projects around the world rely on Heurist to manage and publish their data. See our list of Projects for more information. Heurist also supports two major infrastructure projects in Australia, the Humanities networked Infrastructure and the Field Acquired Information Management System.
Capabilities
Is Heurist suitable for large and/or complex databases?
Heurist is best-adapted to small-to-medium databases with up to a few hundred thousand records. Standard databases are designed for low-complexity, high-volume data, such as sales records or astronomical observations; they can process large amounts of data, but are rigid and falter when the data become complex. By contrast, Heurist is flexible and can cope with high levels of complexity, at the cost of speed when the data grows to a very high volume.
What types of data can Heurist store?
Heurist supports a large range of data types, including: text, term lists (categories), numeric, date/temporal, media files (image, pdf, audio, video, xml, kml etc.), geospatial data (points, lines, polygons, KML, shapefiles, tiled image files), record pointer and relationship marker fields. Record pointer and relationship marker fields are a powerful methodology for building relationships without the complexity normally associated with modelling multiple entities and their relationships. Media files in a File field may be stored directly within the database or may be referenced through an external URL, such as Youtube or Vimeo.
Can I use Heurist as a citation manager?
No, we do not recommend using Heurist to store you bibliographic data for citations. However, Heurist can be integrated with Zotero in order to link your citations and data analysis. By importing your Zotero library into Heurist, you can link your Zotero data to other data in your database (e.g. biographical data about each author, or geospatial data about place of publication), allowing you to analyse your bibliographic data. Meanwhile, your existing Zotero library can be used to manage your research notes and citations.
Can I use Heurist for bookmarking websites?
Heurist started life as a web bookmarking tool and provides a bookmarklet tool to capture the URL, title and any selected text from a web page, and create a thumbnail of the page. It can also scan a web page or html file (including your browser’s bookmarks html file), selectively import hyperlinks and create records for them.
Will Heurist store photographs, scans and other media files?
Yes, although we recommend that you use a streaming service such as YouTube to store audiovisual content. Heurist supports a wide variety of file formats. Common image formats are automatically thumbnailed and can be viewed at different resolutions and annotated. PDF files are also viewable directly within the interface. Other file types (e.g. Word documents, html files, Flash, spreadsheets etc.) may also be stored and will generally open in the appropriate player or program if installed. In all cases, a file may be referenced by a URL on another website and provided it is accessible for download it will operate exactly the same as if it were stored in the database.
Will Heurist store videos; what video formats does it support?
Although Heurist will store and play video files, there are many problems associated with playback of video files, not least their size and variety of  formats. We strongly recommend storing them in a specialised video services such as Vimeo or Youtube, which will stream them in optimised form to whatever device is in use. The video file is then referenced through its URL stored in a File field (File fields allow local upload but also accept a remote URL). The video will generally then play as an embedded video as though it was stored and streamed directly from the database.
Does Heurist support uncertain and fuzzy dates common in historical data and different calendars?
Yes. Heurist date fields can record dates in years (for many archaeological and historical applications), in day-month-year format for most contemporary dates, or as uncertain dates which have a range of probability associated with them. Dates can be described in terms of terminus post/ante quem, probable date range, and likelihood of position within the range of uncertainty. C14 dates with statistical deviations are also supported. Heurist can also store and convert dates in several common date formats including Julian, Gregorian, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist calendars.
Can Heurist cope with non-roman and right to left alphabets such as Arabic?
Yes. Heurist can utilise any character set that is available in Unicode.
Can the interface be used in different languages?
Yes. Heurist has built-in support for French and Russian. Other languages can be added by the user by adding to the internationalisation file, to which we can give you access.
Setup
Do I need assistance from a programmer to set up Heurist?
If you are our free servers, you should not need technical assistance. You can quickly build, develop and maintain your databases through point and click interactions with a web browser interface. The only area where some technical skill is required (at the level of simple html) is in writing specialised output formats in the report formatter function, or if you wish to use XSL transformations to generate output from Heurist’s XML stream. Most users will never need a programmer.
Would it take me less time to set up a database in Heurist than in an alternative system?
Not just less time, but much less time. Heurist builds complete functioning databases in a few seconds, and then allows you to rapidly add to and extend these databases through a web browser interface. The process of building databases is further accelerated by Heurist’s ability to selectively import new entity types, fields and term lists from exemplar databases and templates set up by the Heurist team, and from any other database registered with the central Heurist clearinghouse. Once you are familiar with the system, most projects can be set up in an hour or so and even the most complex and challenging projects will not require more than a few days.
Can I change my mind about database structure after I’ve entered data?
Absolutely. One of the great strengths of Heurist is that you can modify and enhance the structure of your data at any time, while maintaining the integrity of the data you have already entered. This allows you to start your database quickly, and over time building up its complexity and sophistication as your research needs evolve, without ever having to migrate existing data.
Can I import an existing database structure to get started?
Heurist’s database creation function gives a choice of initial database templates. You can then selectively import the structure from any database which has been registered with the central Heurist index, including carefully structured exemplars and documented templates for specific domains. The record types, field types and term lists imported from other sources can then be edited as required to fit your specific needs.
How easy is it to add new entity types to my database?
Very easy. When a new database is created, it automatically inherits a default set of widely used record types from the chosen template. Additional record types can be imported from any database registered with the central Heurist index. In addition to editing these imported record types, you can click the Add Record Type button and define a new one by filling in information on two popup forms.
How do I link entity types together to show relationships?
The simplest and most powerful ways of linking records are record pointer fields and relationship marker fields. These provide contextualised relatonships – prompts directly within the data entry form for a record – which establish a simple one-way relationship with another record (record pointer) or a complex two way relationship with another record (relationship marker). Like any other field type, both record pointer and relationship marker fields can be made optional or required, single or repeating, and can also be constrained to specific target record types. Relationship markers have additional attributes – the type of relationship in each direction, the time range for the relationship (if applicable) and other information about the relationship, such as notes and bibliographic justification of the relationship.
Can I reorder and rename fields in a form without affecting existing data?
Can I verify the integrity of my database?
Existing Data
Can I import existing data into Heurist?
Yes. There are several options in the ‘Populate’ menu of your Heurist database. In particular, you can import from a spreadsheet/csv file, from xml data, from Zotero or from a KML (Google Earth) file. We are happy to advise on your data import needs.
My photographs are on an existing system can I reference them through the web?
Yes, using the File field type. File fields can reference an external URL or an uploaded file in the database.
Can I bulk upload multimedia items to my Heurist database?
Yes. Heurist’s In-Situ Bulk File Import tool let’s you quickly import thousands of files (such as images)Â
Can I import spatial data such as KML files?
Heurist supports the import of KML (Keyhole Markup Language) data, a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser such as Google Earth.
Publishing
Can I publish data from Heurist to a website?
Yes. When you are exploring your data in the ‘Explore’ menu, you will see several different viewpoints on the data in the right-hand pane (e.g. a map, network, or report). If you wish to embed one of these views into another website, simply click the globe icon to copy a code snippet, which you can then paste into your website or CMS of choice. Data can be filtered and reports can be customised before pasting to your other website.
Can I create a website for my Heurist database?
Yes. Heurist has its own built in CMS (content management system), and provides free web hosting, meaning that you can create a free website to provide public access to your database from within Heurist itself. You also have this capability if you run Heurist on your own server. You have complete control over which parts of your data appear to the public on your website.
Can I style custom reports to match my web site?
Yes, custom reports can be styled using CSS to match your website’s theme.
Can I write custom PHP to extend the Smarty report function?
Yes, we can grant you backend access to your website if you wish to write custom PHP and extend your published reports.
Analysis and Visualisation
Can I analyse my data using Heurist?
Yes, Heurist allows you to explore your data through searching and filtering. You can find records that match particular criteria, and explore how different records are connected to one another. Heurist also supports basic cross-tabulation, where you can compare multiple aspects of your records to one another (e.g. how many books were published in each city in each year). For more advanced statistical analysis, you can export data from Heurist in formats used by standard analysis tools such as R, Python, SPSS or Gephi.
Does Heurist support complex search criteria?
Yes. An assisted search dialog can help you build complex, editable search strings. A complete search syntax is provided. Heurist also allows ‘faceted search’, which allows you to progressively add components to your query of the database, and add interactive elements to it (e.g. a time slider to interactively filter people by year of birth).
Can I create a website for my Heurist database?
Yes. Heurist has its own built in CMS (content management system), and provides free web hosting, meaning that you can create a free website to provide public access to your database from within Heurist itself. You also have this capability if you run Heurist on your own server. You have complete control over which parts of your data appear to the public on your website.
Can Heurist visualise the structure (schema) of my database?
Yes, you can visualise your database structure as either a list or a network diagram.
Can I export the data from my Heurist database to an analysis package?
Data can easily be exported from Heurist in a variety of text formats including csv, tsv and GEPHI GEFX. You can define custom output formats using the report formatter.
Mapping and Timelines
Can I map my data using Heurist?
Yes. All you need to do is enter geographical data for your records using the geospatial field.
Can I use my own scanned Maps as base layers in a Heurist map?
Can I create a timeline in Heurist?
Yes. Simply recording one or a pair of date fields in a record will cause it to appear on the timeline when it is part of the result set being visualised. Records with both spatial data and date information will appear on both the map and the timeline and may be filtered from the map when they do not appear on the currently visible section of the timeline.
Can I use existing ontologies to structure my data?
Can I publish my database as linked open data?
Can I import existing ontologies into my databas?
Is Heurist secure?
NB: If you are seeing a ‘This site is unsafe’ message in Google Chrome on a Mac, this is an error. You can fix by following these steps.