Overview
In this section, we will explain the overall structure of Germinate along with an overview of the various data types that Germinate supports.
Germinate can be used with or without user authentication. If the administrator of Germinate decided to enable authentication, you will be asked to log in using a username and password.
The figure above shows the login page of Germinate. If you already have a user account, simply enter the username and password into the provided text boxes.
If you do not have a user account, click on the link below the login button to create an account. You may get asked to agree to a license agreement before being able to create an account.
To modify your user account, you can log in to Gatekeeper, which is Germinate's user authentication portal. It can be accessed from the help popup on the login page.
The figure above shows the main layout of the Germinate web interface. The main menu of Germinate is positioned to the left (Figure A). It is used to navigate between pages. Submenus can be expanded by simply clicking on the items showing the caret symbol. The menu is explained in more detail in Section Functionality. The overall search feature, shown in Figure B, allows you to run a full-text search across the whole database. The results will be grouped into topical categories. See Section Functionality for more details. The interface has a banner along the top containing the Germinate logo and a few dropdown menu items in the top right corner (c.f. Figure C). These items include the language selector which will be covered in Section Functionality, social media buttons, the marked item lists covered in Section Functionality, a user menu with specific functions based on your type of account, a "contact us" button and, finally, a help button that can be clicked to get more information about the current page (c.f. Section Functionality). An overview of the number of database items for certain types is shown in Figure D. Recent news about both the Germinate interface and the contained data are available in the news section shown in Figure E. Finally, a section about other projects that are related to the project you are currently looking at are available in Figure F.