JungleDragon v2 beta starts today

Hello wildlife friends!

I'm proud to announce a cool new feature today: specie identifications. This feature allows you to identify the animal, plants or fungus on a photo. Once you do, JungleDragon will show all kinds of interesting information about that specie, such as its habitat, feeding, predators, defense strategies and much, much more.

This will turn JungleDragon into much more than just a photo site, it will become an educational experience as well. Please read the full details of this beta on my blog:

www.ferdychristant.com/blog/archive/DOMM-8RLNNY

And here's a demo video that shows how specie identification works:

Congrats, Ferdy! This is an absolutely fantastic feature! I absolutely love the specie identification - it really makes JungleDragon much more than just a photo site... great!

Thanks Gernot!

Wowwww - this is impressive !!

I'll go and watch the video. Hey, now its not only my limited knowledge but the combined forces of the universe! By the power of Greyskull, that's an interesting improvement Ferdy, my compliments,

It's easiest to indeed lookup your species on Wikipedia and look for 'binomial name' or 'trinomial name'. If not present the identification will fail. This is the hard bit. There are a lot of species pages without statements of binomial or trinomial: they will not be recognized when entering the exact name in jungledragon. When one of the statements is found enter the name used on the wiki page and JD will find it. It did on my eurasian horned owl picture, which did not resolve owl or horned own, but did resolve Eurasian horned owl as stated on wiki. It's in the help file too;-)
Ferdy: in many pages it says 'type species' giving binomial or trinomial info. Can this be used too?

hi Ludo, thanks for the reply, and for picking up this feature with so much enthusiasm!

Correct, identification can be tricky, as Wikipedia is fairly inconsistent in its structure, spelling and casing. However, it can be explained that "Owl" fails. An Owl is not a specie, it is a family of species. So the identification has to be specific enough, it has to be at the specie level, in zoological terms. This does mean that identification is not always intuitive and indeed referencing Wikipedia helps a lot.

Right now, the trigger for JungleDragon to recognize a Wikipedia page as a specie page is:

- The taxobox being present (in Wiki markup: taxobox, autotaxobox or speciebox)
- The binomial, trinomial, or species property being available and set

I did see some pages using "type species", I will look into whether it makes sense to include that in detection. The tricky part here is that I also came across pages that have that property yet they are not at the specie level.

Dear community,

I'm very happy that some of you are already identifying species and I've been closely monitoring the result. I noticed that in some pages, the specie text contained strange Wikipedia markup text that I did not come across before in earlier testing.

This is to let you know that I just made an update to my parsing engine to fix that. I expect that new, unforeseen issues will continue to occur. I will continue to fix those. Over time the chance that specie text is strangely rendered will increasingly become smaller.

Hi Ferdy,

Just tested (as you saw;-)) and it works great! I'll go over my images later and identify them as I go when I'm having a little more time than I have these days... But, great work! Love it!

Thanks Kurt, no rush, but looking forward to your identifications :) Glad you like this.

Dear friends,

I just had a look a today's specie identifications and overall things are looking good. I did find some strange formatting in the text of three species (red fox, kingfisher and vipera berus) but those are fixed now. Another improvement is list formatting. Before they were displayed using an asterix (*), now they are more stylish in their formatting. Even nested list are indented now.

Keep identifying and I'll keep monitoring and improving :)

Hi Ferdy!
Today I was trying to ID a species 'House sparrow' on one of the photo's Rick Lieder made. It did not succeed and took forever. On my activities is was stated as IDd (/3518/predicting_storms_passer_domesticus.html). Maybe it is something on the sparrow wiki page, I could attach the Loggerhead sea turtle to it with no problems. I removed the latter, as it was for testing. Just to inform you:) Hope you can find out what's going wrong with this tag.
Or maybe there's something fishy with new lookups, as cached ones seem to function fine. I tried 'pica pica' as another new lookup. It failed too (never succeeding).
Great feature.

hi Ludo, thanks so much for your problem reports. Hereby an update:

- House Sparrow works now. Most specie pages on Wikipedia use the {{Taxobox}} template to classify the specie. The sparrow page uses the {{autotaxobox}}. My engine can handle that, but it was case sensitive. I've fixed that and the sparrow specie is successfully rendered now. The only remaining problem is that the taxonomy (kingdom etc) is not picked up. Upon investigation it shows that in fact the markup on the Wikipedia side is incorrect, however, it is still a mystery why it even displays correctly on Wikipedia, because it shouldn't.

- The Pica Pica page works now. The problem was with the {{audio}} tag which broke my parsing. When you look at that specie page now you'll notice some imperfect text rendering, but those are hard to fix in this case, as a combination of very complex Wiki markup is used on that page. For now I think it is readable, and "good enough".

Thanks for reporting these problems, it will only make the specie engine better. Each problem solved means it doesn't appear in the future for similar situations on other specie pages.

Another problem trying to identify a species is the Ring-Tailed Lemur. Not sure whats going on with that page. Yet another Wikipedia anomaly?

hi Dragon, thanks for your identifications!

I've fixed the Lemur issues, problem was an unexpected {{R and {{#tag combination in the Wiki markup, filtering those now. I've even edited the actual page on Wikipedia as it had a slight formatting error.

Aha! So the improvements go both ways. Thanks Ferdy!

Just deployed another update:

- 3 more fixes to the parsing and rendering engine
- You can now click on a range map to launch it full size, a range map is the map graphic you see on some specie pages
- specie pages are now included in the sitemap, which is used by search engines to index JungleDragon content
- For my own purposes, specie data is now included in the various stats about JungleDragon that are automatically collected each day

There's much more to come, I will make frequent small improvements in the coming weeks.

So is there a URL for un-identified photos? Something like http://www.jungledragon.com/unclassified

@Dragon: Nope, not yet but its its on the todo list. Should make it a lot easier to find photo left to identify. I'm thinking of reusing the above URL you mentioned. It would make for a single overview of photos where any of the following is true:

- No tags
- No description
- No specie identified

What do you think?

Definitely sounds like a winner to me. But the only issue with that page is that if you click on the image it prompts for the details rather than taking you to the image itself. This is a bit disconcerting given that it is a change from all the other image group pages.

Yes, the idea there was that you can quickly tag an image without having to visit the image page each time. I will likely remove it, since the interaction now becomes more complex and include more than just tagging.

I was looking forward to these features. Nice work Ferdy!

Thanks Bas, and very cool that you have started identifying species. I checked them all and only found two minor rendering issues, which are both fixed now.

In between stat for the community: we already have 154 unique specie pages after only a few days. The amount of identifications is higher, as we often have more than one photo of a specie (which is a good thing of course). Of these 154, about 10 had issues varying from small rendering issues to blocking issues that failed to parse at all. All are resolved.

Issues are going to pop up but they will become increasingly rare over time. It seems all of you are able to use this successfuly without detailed training, and that makes me very happy. I'm very proud of what we are accomplishing here, together as a community.

And on a personal note: I was expecting specie identification to be tedious, yet neccessary work. I have to admit now that I kind of find it a fun thing to do. It is much more rewarding than tagging and quite educational.

@Dragon, and everyone else interested....

The following overview:

http://www.jungledragon.com/unclassified

...will show all photos that have no tags and/or no specie identified. You can see it as a "todo" list of photos that need work. This is particularly useful for seeing which photos still need a specie to be identified. I have dropped the "description" field requirement from this overview. Before, photos with an empty description would also appear in this overview, but not anymore.

The only "problem" of this overview is that some photos will never have a specie identified, for example a landscape photo, so they will be in this overview permanently. I could solve that by adding an option "this is not a specie" on the specie identification dialog, but that will have to wait for now.

Well that's an improvement. Guess I now have a default starting page for JD.

@Dragon: That sounds like music to my ears :)

It's a big task though. It takes quite a lot of identifications to move the scale of unidentified photos 1% down. Still, I'm sure that together with a few volunteers we can do it fairly quickly.

hi all,

A few more updates:

- The "identify specie" dialog now autofocuses on the input field so that you do not have to click in it and can start typing immediately

- When you identify a specie, as of now the common name and scientific name of the specie will automatically be added to the image

- If upon your first upload, your photo has IPTC keywords, those keywords are checked for a specie match. If there is a match, your photo is auto-linked to the specie!

I deployed some spectacular improvements again this weekend, please check out the details on my blog:

www.ferdychristant.com/blog/archive/DOMM-8RU2LC

Great improvements Ferdy. It is a lot of fun too, identifying photos (especially if they are not your own and no Latin terms are provided). Great unclassified page!

Hi Ferdy,
I saw a little anomaly in identifying picture 3376, where some extra brackets were shown in the end result.

Would it be possible to also add a feature 'non identifyable' to a picture? For example a photo of ice particles is impossible to identify. This way the 'unclassified' images collection makes more sense.
For me: back to work now:)

Hi Ferdy,
A small glitch or so it seems: photo 3292 is classified but shows up in unclassified. Just to inform you.

@Ludo: Thanks, glad you're having fun. I'm enjoying it as well :)

Thanks for the report on picture3376, will look at that as soon as I can. And concerning your idea, yes I also think we need an option "identification not applicable", will try to deliver that this week.

Thanks, man, you're fast:) Pic 3252 has same ID issues as 3292.

Hi Ferdy,
I could not ID photo 2603 with 'Zygaena carniolica', it seems to get stuck.

And whilst you're digging around. Why does

DragonC, you're right, sometimes it seems to behave irradically, but I'm sure Ferdy will figure it out. You're quite busy identifying:)

Ludo and DragonC, I encountered that bug myself, oddly only on some very specific photos. Will look into what's going on.

Alright, here's some fixes for you:

- There were 12 photos that were identified yet still stayed in the unclassified overview. It's a long story to explain why, but I fixed those manually and made a code change that should prevent it from occuring again. Please do let me know if you encounter it again.

- @Ludo: Rendering glitch for photo 3376 fixed.
- @Ludo: Concerning photo 2603. You've discovered a nice border case: A Wikipedia stub page. It has a taxonomy but no textual content. My engine was not prepared for that, but now it is. Fixing this also solved on of my own issues in the backlog.

Keep throwing problems at me, and I keep fixing them. Thanks guys!

Dear all,

Your wish is my command. You can now set a photo as 'not relevant for specie identification'. This is only to be used on photos where there really is no specie in the photo. The option is in the bottom of the "identify specie" dialog. I intentionally made the option small so that it is not accidentally used when people simply don't know the specie.

Chosing that option has two effects:

- The specie block on the photo page will indicate that there is no specie on the photo. As a result, the "identify specie" button dissapears.

- It will remove the photo from the unclassified overview (unless it has zero tags)

Once this option is chosen, only administrators can undo it (for now).

Thanks for the feedback!

Stats update: We now have 530 unique species, and 1330 photos with a specie identified. I'm proud of you all!

Hi Ferdy, great expansion of the identiciation process, it keeps it nice and clean. I noticed one small glitch: "It has been indicates that there is no specie on this photo." --> 'indicates' needs to be 'indicated'. That's all folks:)

Thanks Ludo, fixed this sloppy error now :)

My man, you are very fast in fixing ;)

Hi Ferdy, could you please ulock image 3587, I would like to identify it as 'Ammophila arenaria', helm grass. Oops:)

@Ludo: image 3587 unlocked and identified.

I was away from jungledragon a few weeks and am looking again now. I am surprised by the specie information how nice it is, it is really informative. It makes me look back my own pictures again because it is so fun to learn more about the species :)

I am thinking about the range of new people I can recommend jungledragon to. First it was mainly to photography enthusiasts, but now It has become an interesting site for nature enthusiasts too.

Job well done Ferdy!

Ferdy, the identification feature works like a charm and feels bugfree, only seldomly when assigning a (mostly cached) type it seems to 'hang'. If I just reload the page (the dialog is still 'processing') the type has been assigned. I am not sure the karma points have been assigned yet, but the IDing worked. The dialog seems to wait but doesn't get an answer (even after a few minutes), so maybe a timing issue of some kind.

@Joost: Thanks for the kind words and welcome back! I agree that JungleDragon v2 makes JungleDragon as a whole a lot more interesting. I'm hoping it attracts new members. I certainly think we now have the ingredients. I encourage community members to recruit other new members!

@Ludo: Duly noted. I have encountered the same issue myself, but have no idea about the root cause yet. Thanks for the overall compliment, identification works a lot better than I expected. It's complex and fragile but it seems to hold up reasonably well so far.

And finally, I once again like to say that I'm very proud of the community in embracing V2 with so much enthusiasm. It is the fuel for me to keep pushing forward. And believe me, we're not done yet :)

Hi Ferdy, I was pondering on the following: am I correct in stating that it used to be possible to remove an identification of species on a photo and correct it? I identified A bombs impatiens incorrectly and could not rectify myself, nor could the owner (Ellen) of the picture. Just thinking aloud, maybe I am overlooking something. Enjoy the evening!

@Ludo. No this was never possible, it must have been your imagination.

Just kidding! I actually commented the delete button out whilst working on the new specie widget, and forgot to enable it again. It should be back now :)

Hehe, grinnik, ja that's a good joke, you had me there on your first sentence:) Thanks for fixing it! Ellen corrected the identification today, great!

Ferdy, would it be an idea to see who did the identification on a photo when not equal to the owner? That would make discussing about the type easier perhaps. Just an idea!

hi Ludo, great idea...it's implemented now.

Hi Ferdy!
Another spin of the mind: would it be possible to create a photo view of all photos ever to be shown on the homepage roulation? Its a bit of a highlight view, sorted on added date or such.

Ps. great that you have expanded the homepage number of photos to roulate (waddayoucallit:))

Grtz!

hi Ludo,

That's currently not possible, because a photo is on the homepage or not. Once it no longer is, there is no way for me to know it ever was. However, this overview comes close:

http://www.jungledragon.com/all/popular

Note the extra sort option below to set the period. The photos you will see there are largely but not entirely the same as the ones once promoted to the homepage. I hope this satisfies your need somewhat?

I have seen this overview. I was just wondering if I could see which of my photo's were on the homepage once. Most of them do show up in the popular.
Just a wild idea, I think me and others who have had the honour of the homepage would like to enjoy the credit even after the moment on the homepage has passed. That was about it.

Gotta go, my wife is expecting my presence any moment now:) (at work still)

Later!

I had such an idea too. I find it a bit of a shame there are so many beautiful pictures on the site, but a random visitor only sees the few last ones.
Seeing that there is so much white space left and right (on 24"), maybe this can be used to rotate some of the 'old' pictures?
Makes me wonder why the site is designed small and high while all modern screens are wide? I see this with a lot of sites so is this in a webpage design guideline?

hi Joost,

Concerning those beautiful pictures, the "popular photos" overview shows them all. I could make a "featured" overview of photos that once were on the homepage, but trust me, they will be the same photos as on the popular page:

http://www.jungledragon.com/all/popular

Concerning screen space, making a site fit into 1024 x 768 for long has been a guideline. Having said that, the guideline is quickly getting outdated due to mobile devices, tablets, but also TVs with internet. I do have plans to make the site more "responsive", scaling it to the size of your screen. This is a major overhaul though, and even harder in the case of a photo site that has fixed format images. I will solve this eventually, but I hope you guys have patience in this area.

@Ludo: I see you found a creative solution using a photo list. That's not ideal, since you would manually have to keep it in sync. I've added your request to the todo list, but I can't say yet when it will be delivered, currently there's a lot of things that take a ton of work to implement so I'm already stretching my capacity. For example, what I'm working on right now is absolute total hell, but oh so worth it. Stay tuned and happy easter!

Hi Ferdy! Yes, I did:) Glad you like it, though its flaky. It's just a way of me keeping up my own archives:)
Man, I am so curious as to why you just don't tell me:)! Grin, naah, I like surprises, as I think we all do:)
Happy easter, may you and yours find lots of eggs in the garden!

Thx for the cards, F! I'll spread the word:) They look great btw! Wow, impressive iconography btw, you did order them designed, so professional!

Good to hear they've been received well, Ludo, have fun with them and thanks in advance for spreading the word!

Will do will do:)

By the way, don't be afraid to start a new thread in the forum for specific topics. This thread is getting very long and covers many topics by now.

Ferdy, WOW WOW WOW, this new 'World of Wildlife' feature is pretty cool! I am at work now, so I should not be here:) Later!

@Ludo. You're being very unreasonable, why don't you take the rest of the day of?

Grin, yep that would be something:)

Hi Ferdy, didn't know where to post it but some picture doesn't want to id, though wiki has a binominal. It's picture '4110', refering to type 'Muscari botryoides'.
wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscari_botryoides
Just for debugging, maybe you can see what's wrong with it. Thx mate!

hi Ludo, for general topics not belonging to anything specific, I suggest to use the Campfire forum. In this case the topic is related to identification which has its own forum. Once in the right forum, please create a new topic for each request, otherwise a lot of people are getting notifications for topics they did not subscribe to.

Anyway, thanks for spotting that error, will have a look at it shortly!