Overview of the Citizen Dan Components

Here are the main components or widgets to this Citizen Dan demo:

  • Concept Explorer — this Flex widget (also called the Relation Browser) is a dynamic navigator of the concept space (ontology) that is used to organize the content on the instance. Clicking on a bubble causes it to assume the central position in the diagram, with all of its connecting concepts shown. Clicking on a branch concept then causes that new node to assume the central position, enabling one to "swim through" the overall concept graph. For this instance of Citizen Dan, the MUNI ontology is used; a diagram shows the full graph of the MUNI structure. See further the concept explorer's technical documentation
  • Story Viewer — any type of text content (such as stories, blog posts, news articles, local government reports, city council minutes, etc.) can be submitted to the system. This content is then tagged using the scones system (subject concepts or named entities), which then provides the basis for linking the content with concepts and other data. The story viewer is a Flex widget that highlights these tags in the content and allows searches for related content based on selected tags. See further the story viewer's technical documentation
  • Map Viewer — the map viewer is a Flex widget that presents layered views of different geographic areas. The title bar of the viewer allows different layers to be turned on and off. Clicking on various geographic areas can invoke specific data and dashboard views. See further the map viewer's technical documentation
  • Charting Widgets — the system provides a variety of charting options for numeric data, including pie, line and bar charts. These can be called directly or sprinkled amongst other widgets based on a dashboard specification (see below)
  • Filter Component — the filter, or browse, component provides the ability to slice-and-dice the information space by a choice of dataset, type of data or data attribute. These slices then become filter selections which can be persisted across various visualizations or exports. See further the browse component's technical documentation
  • Search Component — this component provides full-text, faceted search across all content in the system; it may be used in conjunction with the filtering above to restrict the search space to the current slice. See further the search tool's technical documentation
  • Dashboard Viewer — a dashboard is a particular layout of one or more visualization widgets and a set (or not) of content filtering conditions to be displayed on a canvas. Dashboard views are created in the workbench (see next) and given a persistent name for invoking and use at any other location in the application
  • Workbench — this rather complex component is generally intended to be limited to site administrators. Via the workbench, records and datasets and attributes may be selected, and then particular views or widgets obtained. When no selections are made in the lefthand panel, all are selected by default. Then, in the records viewer (middle upper), either records or attributes are selected. For each attribute (column), a new display widget appears. All display widgets interact (a selection in one reflects in the others). The nature of the data type or attribute selected determines which available widgets are available to display it; sometimes there are multiples which can be selected via the lower left dropdown list in any given display panel. These various display widgets may then be selected for a nameable layout as a persistent dashboard view (functionality not shown in this public demo)
  • Exporter — the exporter component appears in multiple locations across the appliance, either as a tab option (e.g., Filter component) or as a dropdown list to the lower right of many screens. A variety (and growing!) number of export formats are available. When it appears as a dropdown list, the export is limited to the currently active slice. When invoided via tab, more export selection options are available. See further the technical documentation for this component
  • Other Tools — a number of other tools are available to admins in the actual appliance, but are not exposed in this demo:
    • Importer — like the exporter, there are a variety of formats supported for ingesting data or content into the system. Prominent ones include spreadsheets (CSV), XML and JSON. The irON notation is especially well suited for dataset staging for ingest. At import time, datasets can also be appended or merged. See further the technical documentation for this component
    • Dataset Submission and Management — new datasets can be defined, updated, deleted, appended and granted various access rights and permissions, including to the granularity of individual components or tools. For example, see further this technical documentation
    • Records Manager — every dataset can have its records managed via so-called CRUD rights. Depending on the dataset permissions, a given user may or may not see these tools. See further the technical documentation for each of these create - read - update - delete tools.