Product Release 31 October 2018

Rich Term List

Sometimes you’d like to see more information at a glance directly in the Term List. Until now, it contained just the terms in two languages. With the enriched Term List you may now select the value of a term property, say a “Usage” tag, as another column.
Further, a little toggle allows you to quickly limit the content of the Term List, namely to only contain terms from the branch below the currently selected concept. In contrast to the branch filter, which works globally, also affects search, and is “sticky”, the Scope toggle in the Term List always follows the selected concept, but does not affect search. You can compare its behaviour to typical file explorer or folder like navigation.

Concept Cards

Concept cards behave like a little summary, a preview on a concept’s content.
This is quite similar to Google Maps: when you hover over a location, you get a preview summary-like information about the location. Now in Coreon you get a summary about the concept. Ideally, this can save you a lot of clicks: namely instead of clicking on a node to inspect what is in the concept and then clicking back, you already learn about a concept’s content when hovering over the node – see the screenshot when hovering over a node in the Concept Map.

A little note: Currently what is shown in the card is still fixed: an image (if present), 1st and 2nd language terms. In a couple of weeks we will enhance this functionality to allow users to customise it by selecting one or two properties to be also directly rendered in the card, such as a typical Definition or Concept applies-to value.

Breadcrumbs

The first designs we had already long time ago. Breadcrumbs – you know them from web pages – allow you to directly navigate along the hierarchical relations, the concept path.
We display two variants:

• Concept headings (always): this is available in any repository, and shows the concept path directly above the concept heading. This gives you an immediate information about the context.
• By using a property value: this can be defined in the dashboard of the repository, including a custom separator between the values.

Why the latter, why via a property?

This introduces nomenclature support into Coreon. When you configure a specific breadcrumb property, you also specify its type. If the type is numeric, you may even set this to have an auto-increment value (1 - 2 - 3 …). Now, together with the custom separator, for instance just a dot (.), the values of the properties of each concept from the root to the currently selected concept are concatenated, rendering then
breadcrumb strings like 1.1 / 1.2 / 1.2.1 / 1.2.1.1 etc.

What breadcrumb do we show when there is not a single, unique path to
the root but several possibilities (= poly-hierarchies)? Well, you iterate through the set of potential paths – similar to social media sites LinkedIn or Xing, where there is also a functionality like “Show me alternative connections to this person”.

Too much theory? Enjoy a short demo video on Coreon breadcrumbs.

Feedback Workflow

Not only but particularly for Ad hoc users!
Even in well maintained knowledge systems users may spot an error here or there, miss a concept, a term, or have just a comment … With a simple click on the Comment button users are encouraged to send feedback to the maintenance team of the repository. Each feedback item is put onto the Todo List the maintainers (yes, this a first step to a Task List / Collaboration module in Coreon).
Of course, this functionality is available to anyone logged in, also for users without maintenance / editing rights.

Focused UI for Ad-hoc Users

We are improving the “Welcome” experience for ad-hoc and first-time users. Besides above mentioned Concept Card functionality, two further enhancements are already in production:

• Less controls: In the application, users without maintainer rights will no longer be overwhelmed by power user buttons, controls and widgets. Thus, the following interaction elements are now hidden when you are logged on with “only” user rights: Recent Changes list, Clipboard widget and its accompanying pins, History and System settings.
  According to Coreon beta participants, these measures indeed already simplify the UI significantly.
• Define your users’ default environment: When users access Coreon first time its default UI may not meet the ideal configuration. For some repositories the desired default orientation of the concept map may be ‘portrait’ (top-down), but for others it may rather be ‘landscape’ (horizontal); or: what language should be rendered first as a default etc.
  How? You can configure the best default UI of a repository for your organisation: 1) login with repository manager rights, 2) arrange the UI as desired (place and state of widgets, selected languages, Term List columns). 3) Finally, on the Coreon bottom bar, just click “Share current UI as default”. Everyone newly accessing the repository will now start with this environment.

These first UI changes for non-expert users will see more and more complementary enhancements over the next couple of months, namely towards a “Multilingual Knowlege Portal”, such as a redesigned Repository Homepage / Repository Selector page, custom Themes for large organisations etc.