BioWurld: Design Philosophy
Need normal search and browse categories
No resources for annotation, so require minimal intervention from administrators
Thus, users will add and categorise their own links
Still, some ‘policing’ might be required
(Meta)data in BioWurld needs to reflect current status of links
Need ability to spider links upto a certain depth
Although in the beginning the issues mentioned above were not very important, they became more and more an eye-sore as the web matured and the need for quality information arose.
Nowadays users become irritated after one or two broken links - in the beginning of the web this was all part of the experience. The upraise of ‘spammers’ (in whatever form) also neccesitated some form of control over which resources enter a database. Furthermore, searching for a resource is often not enough anymore (lots of hits): a need grows to have a browsable directory of categorised resources.