Add filters to Nearby

[misaochan]

This was inspired by #618 , but I decided to create a new issue as this is a much more general suggestion.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to have filters where people can filter out certain types of Nearby items. The most obvious usage would be for the "instanceOf" label, where someone could say they wanted "historic sites" or "suburbs" etc specifically, and only see those pins on the map. And of course, for the items that don't exist anymore, as per #618 . Maybe even filter for items that have or don't have Wikipedia articles, etc?

This would likely need to be done alongside #591 , as currently our range and location of pins is a bit restrictive.

[gupta1anubhav]

Even I was thinking of the same thing as the app shows places inside fix radius around user's location.
And random important places are shown.

[nicolas-raoul]

I would totally use this feature to filter out schools, to avoid the creepiness haha

When I go to a place where there are a lot of pins I might want to only show the important ones that are not closed. But once I have uploaded most of them and the pins are getting rare, I will probably want to show the other ones too.

What is important is probably subjective.

[misaochan]

I'm curious about the discussion of "important" - is this actually a Wikidata tag or are we just taking the lay meaning of it?

@nicolas-raoul Haha, good usage. ;) I've been thinking a bit about using the "instanceOf" label as a filter. There are many types of instanceOf, probably more than we can easily display in a checklist, I think. I wonder how we can work around that. Should we just allow filtering of several common ones? Should we have a "More" button that users can click to be brought to a different activity that shows all of them?

[nicolas-raoul]

There is no concept of "importance" in Wikidata. I just meant that some people want to take pictures of all religious buildings, while other people want to take pictures of all religious building, it is just a matter of personal interests.

I started computing statistics about the "instanceOf" of the points we deal with, it will probably take a day or two before all results get computed but here are the results so far:
class-statistics.txt
(only items with latitude/longitude and no image)

[nicolas-raoul]

Here are the types of items that have a latitude/longitude but do not have a picture:

 282548 mountain
 210804 human settlement
 165928 river
  94992 stream
  82413 village
  66246 hill
  44348 island
  34886 dam
  34651 movie theater
  34643 building
  31652 valley
  31146 unincorporated community
  25590 watercourse
  23946 lake
  23486 point
  23315 desa
  21930 fourth level administrative division in Indonesia
  21741 spring
  19563 town in China
  17906 canal
  17637 airport
  17610 park
  16816 wadi
  16611 hamlet
  16557 ravine
  16189 high school
  15103 radio station
  14727 lagoon
  13940 former building or structure
  12896 bight
  12389 rural commune of Vietnam
  12180 train station
  11878 ridge
  11632 house
  11104 township of the People's Republic of China
  10300 rural settlement of Russia
   9467 reservoir
   ...

Full file: stats2.txt
My computer crashed in the middle so there is no data for Europe/Africa. I will run my script again in a month, for now the data above gives an idea of what to expect.

As you can see:

• There is a very long tail. If we want to cover 75% of the data we have to provide 40 types.
• We can group types, for instance "river" and "stream". While we could get the SPARQL request to get parent classes, that would probably make the already slow request even slower. The pragmatic solution is probably to hard-code mappings from their QIDs to categories that make sense to our app, for instance Q4022 (river), Q47521 (stream) → "watercourse"

[misaochan]

@nicolas-raoul Thanks! The data is very interesting, I actually had no idea there were so many. It is also interesting that there are more "rural commune of Vietnam"s than there are global train station points, lol.

This does complicate things a bit. Maybe we should come up with a simple prototype first, and then see if many people actually use the filters, before enhancing it by hardcoding mappings to improve coverage?

My suggestion is that we take all of the ones with >10k points, and remove the country-specific ones. Then in the filter UI we have a checklist with "Doesn't exist anymore", "Has Wikipedia article", and "Instance of". If the user checks the Instance Of item, we take them to a separate fragment that has all the points I mentioned and they can choose which ones to check.

What do you guys think?

[VojtechDostal]

I'd LOVE to have a possibility of filtering the results (filtering out streets in my case, photographing them is BORING :-) ).

I was thinking that maybe we could use parts of the queries used by Petscan (in the Wikidata tab, see attached image). You can just type any number of properties or items separated by commas and they will get filtered. This is an option for power users anyway.

[neslihanturan]

Here is my proposed design for this filtering feature:

Actually I am quite happy with how design evolved. Here are my decision parameters:

• Since they were one of the suggested element in material design guidelines for filtering, I decided to use chips. The other alternative is checkboxes.
• The first field, state of the place has limited number of options and user input would be nonsense. So I decided to use filter chips with them which you can click to select/deselect.
• The second field will have almost 40 options, so I thought writing some inputs could help to choose. Thus, I decided to use input chips with this field.
• It would be great if we could design small new icons for each options, not necessary though.
• This design also provides user to see their selections on the same screen.

---

• My only concern is, is it hard to discover the input field on second option? However, I think people used to use this types of action, ie. gmail has the same.

Can't wait to hear your feedbacks:)

[VojtechDostal]

Hello Neslihan, it looks great from a UX perspective. I am worried that it's not customizable enough, though. Will it be possible to filter custom classes of objects? For example, Czech Republic has all streets imported and I'd like to filter them out. It could be the same for eg. buddhist temples in Nepal. Is it possible to enter any type of class or will your tool be limited to only 40 options?

[misaochan]

Hi @neslihanturan , thanks for the mockup!

• I love the "search" field for place type, good thinking. :) If user discovery is a concern, maybe have a "search" icon next to the field?
• Love the chips for place state.
• I think the entire filter card should be collapsible, similar to the cards used in the upload process. Some people are on small screens, and this card would take up a lot of unnecessary space if people aren't using it
• "Has photo" should probably be: "Has Wikipedia article"?
• I think checkboxes would suit place type better than chips. The reason is that people should be able to filter for more than one at a time, and also for "everything but". For instance, someone might want "everything except schools" whereas someone might want "only monuments", and another person might want "only schools and monuments", etc. So IMO with checkboxes, we can start with everything enabled, and then users can disable certain class types as they wish. There should also be options to "select all" and "deselect all". However I am not sure how to get this to work with the search field, it may require some reconfiguration.

@VojtechDostal we were discussing the issue of classes here. Edited: I looked over our current code and it does seem feasible backend-wise to allow users to search for custom classes (with the caveat that if they search wrongly, no pins will show up). However I'm not sure yet how we can implement this UX-wise. Perhaps it could be an additional "custom" option separate from the list of mainstream options?