Ratings for locations and names and upcoming design changes

Pleiades is designed to allow for any number of names and locations in the context of a place, but has been lacking a measure of relative significance or value that might be usefully conveyed to researchers or the public. Some features of the site itself stand to benefit from a weighing of objects: if a place were to be mapped or labeled using just one location or name, which would it be? The answer, we think, is the one most preferred by the Pleiades user community. There are ways to infer preference, but first and foremost we will actively solicit preferences using a new user interface element: a three star rating for each location or name. In the page for Pleiades place 638753 (Aphrodisias/Ninoe/etc) you will see an enhanced listing of locations and names.

For demonstration's sake I've given the Theater a rating of 1 out of 3 and the name Aphrodisias a rating of 2 out of 3. Every other location or name begins with no ratings. The lists are sorted in order of descending average rating value and the total number of ratings is shown in parentheses after the stars. If authenticated, you may click on the stars for any location or name see a rating widget pop up (browser javascript required, of course).

Remove or change the rating and the location or name listing on the page is refreshed immediately. This is intended to enable rapid and painless rating of any or all of a place's locations or names. Your personal rating is persisted in the system, but not shared with other users. Please try it out soon with some of your favorite places.

Our first automated use for ratings will be in the representative latitude and longitude values written into the daily table of places (see dumps). The representative point will be taken from the place's highest average rated location. In general, we'll be emphasizing the average ratings, though it's clear that rating open the door for some kinds of personalized user experience (map only locations you've rated 1 or higher, for example).

To accommodate ratings we've changed the layout of place pages, moving the map to the left and location and name listings to the right. This isn't the last layout change we'll be making; the maps, while interesting, push a lot of information down below the bottom of a browser window and we're wasting a lot of room at the top of the window with large banners and swaths of white space. Shrinking the map and adding an option to pop up a larger version is probably the change you'll see first.