NESCent / FossilCalibrations

Fossil calibrations database
http://fossilcalibrations.org
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
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Make search/filter tools subtractive (not additive) #34

Closed jimallman closed 10 years ago

jimallman commented 10 years ago

Copied from an email from Dan Ksepka (@Ksepka), Aug 8, 2014:

Combining search criteria behaves in an additive way. Search "Aves" in Clade, and all Aves pop up. Search "Miocene" in Geological Time and all the Miocene calibrations of any taxa pop up. Search "Aves" and "Miocene" at the same time and the results include all Aves and all Miocene fossils (including turtles and mammals). We'd prefer this worked so that only things that are both Aves and Miocene turn up. If this is too difficult, an alternate fix would be to only only one field (Clade or Geological Time, but not both) to be filled in at a time.

Understood. I’ll dig in and see how hard it is to make these filters “subtractive”, where each added filter narrows the results. Some filters are mutually exclusive, so the final results would be:

INTERSECTION OF  (matched by tip taxa OR matched by clade)  
              +  (matched by min/max age OR matched by geological time)

Versus the current behavior, with results like this:

UNION OF  (matched by tip taxa OR matched by clade) 
       +  (matched by min/max age OR matched by geological time)

I appreciate the simpler option, but hopefully we can do the right thing here.