Highlight Sublayers - Githubissues

A highly desirable new feature emerged from the workshops at Newcastle, Nov 2022. This is the ability to use subsets of another layer to make your own layer.

This is a substantial new feature. A significant amount of work, but desirable and worthy of announcement and fanfare in a future version.

Example 1: (Simple subset) I want to highlight a few sites in a layer that already exists, to produce a map for my more specific area. Eg: there are almost 100 Cantonese theatre sites, such as bamboo theatres, on the Australian goldfields in the Austage venue data. However, you are unlikely to know they are there, so (as learned from marginalisation of early modern womens writing) they are likely to get lost in the noise, in the volume of other sites. Someone building a site about Cantonese opera in Australia would like to locate and use just these sites to make another layer, and title it 'Cantonese Opera Theatres On Australian Gold Fields'.

Example 2: (Collecting sites) I want to choose sites from multiple different layers to add to my small curated layer. This can include items from my own and other's layers.

At the moment this could be achieved by downloading the data, getting the sites you want and putting them back in a new layer. That's ok. Sometimes people need to do that so they can add their own extended data to it also. But it would be easier for many people, and avoid confusing duplication and provenance, if you can just select the site and add to your own sub layer. This could be achieved by:

Logged in user sees checkboxes next to every item in a layer list or search result list, and having a dropdown box of actions. (The checkboxes have 'Select all/unselect all' option and check or uncheck individually)
One action in dropdown is 'Add to layer'.
'Add to layer' dialogue shows list of layers they own to choose from and add. (There is also a button to 'create layer' that just goes to normal create layer.)
Delete from layer, of course, doesn't delete it, but just removes it from my layer.

For lack of a better work, this can be called a 'highlight' layer because it highlights specific parts of the collection, that might otherwise remain lost. Highlight layer navigation can be at the same level as 'Layer/Multilayer/Highlight Layer'. (It could also be called a 'sublayer' but 'highlight' has more positive connotations. Or maybe interlayer. The name is open for suggestions.)

For the moment, user cannot edit items in a sublayer. If they wanted to augment with extended data, or 'correct' it, they can still make it their own one. This may help avoid confusion in provenance.

HughCraig / GHAP

Highlight Sublayers #142