Feature Request: Additional Tag Vocabulary Search Methods

[paul-sheridan]

I'm having trouble searching for particular tags in a tag vocabulary consisting of several thousand entries.

A toy example illustrating the problem: Say I've uploaded from file this tag vocabulary of eight sea creatures (three of which correspond to a type of squid):

banded sea krait
frilled shark
giant squid
minke whale
octopus
squid
tuna
vampire squid

Now suppose I want to tag an annotation with some or another type of squid that I will decide on after examining all the different types of squids in the tag vocabulary. Ideally, typing "squ" in the the annotation modal "Add tag..." field would result in the tags being filtered on exactly these three containing the string "squ":

giant squid
squid
vampire squid

At that point I may decide that "vampire squid" is the most appropriate tag of the bunch, and then choose it.

However, if I understand correctly, Recogito uses a type ahead prefix matching search so that typing "squ" in the said modal results in the single tag "squid" being displayed to the user.

While this is not really a problem for small tag vocabularies where you can examine all the entries by eye, it is in my "thousands of tags" use case.

Proposed solution: I can envision having an additional option, called something like "tag search method", in the annotation modal that lets the user choose from among

• prefix match [default] (this is the currently implemented search method)
• infix match (this is exemplified by my squid example above)
• approximate infix match (e.g. a user search on "grilled shark" yields "frilled shark", a user search on "mink ale" yields "minke whale", and things like that)

The infix matching method is super useful for my use case, and the approximate infix matching one nice to have.