Alternative Homepage Layout/View: Tag based

[hexylena]

We seem to often have discussions over where tutorials should go (they don't fit to just one topic!) or they're a singleton tutorial and we avoid topics with a single tutorial and sometimes they get placed into topics that feel less appropriate.

Motivating Questions

• Can we replace the concept of topics with something better? And how would that look?
• What would a better homepage look like for directing students to tutorials that interest them? Currently people might not think "oh, single cell, let me look in transcriptomics" or "oh, crispr screening, let me look in genome annotation"

Proposal: Tag based view

We could have two views, retaining the current one,

• the current one with subtopics
• a Tag based one (and see if we can group by subtopics there or not, but not an initial goal.)

The tag based view would list all tags, and then clicking on that tag, all materials under those tags. As part of that, we'd expand the tagging:

• tag every tutorial with the current topic
• tag input types (where relevant)
• tag output types (where relevant)

Which would give users a lot of choice for where to start with their analyses.

I think this would resolve both of the motivating questions.

Feedback welcome!!

[hexylena]

Alternative suggestion from the Gallantries meeting:

• Removing topics completely
• Organise by tags

But what about maintainers, maybe now they're tag maintainers?

[hexylena]

Super Tags

My proposal is essentially: "let's blur the line between (some) tags and topics". Imagine for a minute:

• Any existing tag could be "upgraded" into a topic-like tag
  • we could do priorities
  • and subtopics within those upgraded-tags
• They'd have a metadata file like a topic

goal: be as non-intrusive as possible

On the home page

• Nothing would need to change
• Except we have an additional section named something like "cross-topic analyses" (please bikeshed the name), where we list these super-tags.

In a tutorial

tags:
- existing-tag   # plain-old-tag
- e.coli         # Actually a super-tag
- name: covid-19 # super-tag with extra metadata
  subtopic: assembly
  priority: 3

We would now accept either multiple things:

• maybe they're regular tags, and are just shown in topic indexes
• maybe they're super-tags (i.e. have a yaml file in metadata/), and will show up BOTH in their "primary" topic, as well as the e.coli topic.
• maybe they're super-tags with some additional information like a subtopic in which they should be displayed

On the "super-tag" page

It looks JUST like a topic page! Except when we loop over all tutorials tagged with that tag

• if they have a subtopic, we figure out the subtopics and list them
• if they are a 'plain' tag
  • we'll list them at the bottom like we do with "other" non-subtopic'd tutorials
  • except we'll know their "primary" topic and we can show sub-sections under the 'other' section, for each primary topic that's mentioned.

What becomes a super tag?

Probably "any heavily used tag", so e.g. covid-19 could become this super-tag, and then leverage the existing topics that the covid tutorials are sorted under, to automatically arrange their tutorials into nice 'subtopic' like listings.

Single-cell could too, it's less of a cross-topic topic, but even just for visibility.

[hexylena]

Currently our top tags are:

      5 SQL # no
      5 workflows # no
      6 collections # no
      6 eukaryote # yes!
      8 covid19 # yes!
      8 prokaryote # yes!
      9 DDA # no
     11 single-cell # yes!
     13 git-gat # ehhhh
     16 ansible # no
     16 interactive-tools # maybe??

[hexylena]

discussed in GOAT meeting, we'll give it a try. This'll give us a cancer and covid-19 index page (yay). Additionally we'll start tagging better with edam terms.