Reduce categories

[veroandreo]

There are too many categories on the right (plus the upcoming edit, view, and report links from #72) that make scrolling look bad with a 100 % zoom on screen.

The first thing that pops up is MCDA. What does that mean? The 2 external tutorials from @ecodiv linked to that category do not have the word. Then, there's biodiversity, biogeography, ecology, and geobiogeography... Can we group them under ecology and simplify things a bit? Also, geobiogeography is nonsense... the geo part is there already in bio-geography. There's also imagery and remote sensing that could be merged into one.

[ecodiv]

The MCDA (which means multicriteria decision analysis) is a mix-up with another tutorial which I did not submit yet, can/should be removed. The same goes for the nonsense word (not sure how that ended up there). Grouping the other words under ecology is fine by me.

It might be an idea to have a curated list of categories for new tutorials (at least as a suggestion)? Then again, people, like myself, can of course also look at the existing categories.

[veroandreo]

It might be an idea to have a curated list of categories for new tutorials (at least as a suggestion)? Then again, people, like myself, can of course also look at the existing categories.

Yes! I agree. We can build it together, too. I'm open to suggestions on what we want there as categories. So far, I see: Levels (basic, intermediate, advanced), Languages (Spanish, Czeck + Python, R, bash), types of data as in tool names (raster, vector, imagery, time series), OS (Windows), Interfaces (GUI, rgrass, Jupyter, Colab), topics or applications (remote sensing, terrain, hydrology), techniques (as would be the case for MCDA), among others that I cannot sort out. What do you think?

[petrasovaa]

We just had similar discussion:
#71 (comment)

Yes! I agree. We can build it together, too. I'm open to suggestions on what we want there as categories. So far, I see: Levels (basic, intermediate, advanced), Languages (Spanish, Czeck + Python, R, bash), types of data as in tool names (raster, vector, imagery, time series), OS (Windows), Interfaces (GUI, rgrass, Jupyter, Colab), topics or applications (remote sensing, terrain, hydrology), techniques (as would be the case for MCDA), among others that I cannot sort out. What do you think?

Regarding types of data, I feel like raster, vector are too broad so not very helpful, for imagery we already have remote sensing, which kind of covers it. Another would be lidar.

Not sure about terrain, there are related terms like topography, DEM?
Similar case is hydrology, lot of terms there, should everything be just hydrology?

What about all the bio terms: biodiversity, biogeography, geobiogeography (typo?) ? Would ecology cover it?

We could have category GIS for classic geospatial tools like least cost path, cost surface.

[cmbarton]

Levels (basic, intermediate, advanced), Languages (Spanish, Czeck + Python, R, bash), types of data as in tool names (raster, vector, imagery, time series), OS (Windows), Interfaces (GUI, rgrass, Jupyter, Colab), topics or applications (remote sensing, terrain, hydrology), techniques (as would be the case for MCDA), among others that I cannot sort out. What do you think?

I think these are a good start. Some are very general (e.g., raster or vector), but that is OK. The point of tags is to help a user find groups of tutorials with related content, not to search for a particular method.

I would only put in the OS or interface when the content only references one of these (e.g., only Jupyter or how to install for Windows) rather to always have Linux, Mac, Windows on most.

Imagery is probably better (and more inclusive) than remote sensing. We might want to have topics and technique try to mirror the GRASS categories in the manual and/or main menus to have consistency--e.g., terrain and hydrology (from raster) or interpolation and networks (from vector).

[veroandreo]

Re-opening to keep the discussion going on what to do with standalone categories.

[Valyrian-Code]

Following up on the standalone categories. Building on #133, here is how I would group what we have now, roughly along the axes suggested above:

• Level: beginner, intermediate, advanced
• Language: Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Python, R, Bash
• Interface: GUI, rgrass, Google Colab
• Platform: Windows, HPC
• Data: raster, vector, time series, lidar
• Topic: terrain, hydrology, ecology, remote sensing, earthworks, map algebra, thematic maps, cost surface, visualization
• Meta: external, course

For the one-off tags, I would keep the ones that clearly fit an axis (Czech, Windows, parallelization) and drop the library names (NumPy, Landlab, matplotlib), since the full text search already finds those in the tutorial itself. coast and engineering feel too narrow as well, so I would drop them or fold them into a broader topic.

If that sounds right, I am happy to apply it and add the final list to CONTRIBUTING so new tutorials have something to follow.