Future Work

There are a number of possibilities for future work for this project in order to improve aspects such as end-user satisfaction, performance of the system, and security of the system. Some of these possibilities are discussed below.

• Login

  
  

  Currently there is no verification of stories that have been created or edited by users. This is problematic if users submit content that is malicious or offensive. One way of combating this would be to create a login facility and only allow registered users to edit stories. In this way, a user who saves content that is unsatisfactory could we warned and ultimately banned if necessary. A login feature would also mean that the ability to switch to Design mode could be made available only once a user has logged in. A first time user of the site would have no way of accidentally switching to Design mode and becoming confused.




• Improve data quality

  
  

  In Design mode the rock art images that are available for insertion are determined by whether the words antelope, rhebuck, eland, hartebeest, elephant, zebra, bird, ostrich, sheep, feline or cat, wildebeest, buffalo or rhino appear in the text of a story. If one of these words are found in the text, then all of the images from a site that is said to contain rock art of that animal will be available for insertion. A site will generally contain a range of images though, not only images of the given animal. Some of these images may be completely unrelated to a story, such as site recording forms, graphs of the layout of a site and notes scribbled by site recorders. With the current metadata there is, however, no way of distinguishing the contents of an image. Future work could thus include identifying the contents of each image and storing this in either a database or metadata files. One way of identifying the contents would be to use folksonomy. Folksonomy is a method whereby content is annotated and categorized collaboratively by the consumers of the content. The value in this stems from consumers using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which can often only come from an inferred understanding of the content (Wal 2007). User tags would allow a much wider range of keywords to be searched for and should produce more accurate results.




• Workspace and integration between parts

  
  

  A Workspace was one of the features suggested by the client. The Workspace would be a panel that would slide out and allow users to record information. Users would, for example, be able to write down their thoughts, drag content from the page into the workspace and so on. This feature was meant to be present over the different sections of the School of Rock Art site so that users would be able to easily keep a record of a range of information. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, this feature was not implemented in the current project. It would be a very useful feature to add to future implementations and would aid in integrating the different parts of the School of Rock Art site. Further integration could be provided by displaying a tour icon with each image that is available for insertion and also part of a tour in the Guided Tour part of the project. Images that are part of a cave that is available to view through the cave exploration part of the project would also be shown with a cave icon to represent this link.




• Improve Saving of stories

  
  

  At present, when a story is saved, there is no feedback given to users that the story has been saved. The name entered to save the story as, is also not validated to ensure that it does not already exist, or that it does not contain any characters that cannot be used in a file name. This feature could thus be improved to include such validation and to provide feedback in terms of a success message, or an error message with the cause of the error shown. Upon exiting design mode the user could also be prompted to save or discard any changes made.




• Improve Image insertion

  
  

  In Design mode all inserted images will have a default size and cannot be resized. This is mainly due to a bug with Webkit browsers that does not allow images to be resized when the contenteditable property is true. Once this bug is fixed, support could be added to resize inserted images. Alternatively, the system could be edited to support additional browsers that do allow for image resizing, such as Mozilla Firefox. There were also problems with allowing text to flow around inserted images. With the upcoming CSS exclusions module this functionality should be easy to implement and add to the system. The ability to select an image from one's own computer for insertion could also be added.




• Additional Story and Editor Features

  
  

  Additional options could be added to the system. Some of the users in the evaluation suggested adding options to either print or download a story. The various options for editing a story could also be added to, such as being able to change the font of a story, or allowing text to be highlighted. The ability to add other types of media would also be useful. For example, using HTML5, video and audio elements could easily be added to enhance a story. A help panel could also be added describing the various editor options.




• Additional information in stories

  
  

  The stories used in this project are taken from the book \Specimens of Bushman Folklore" by W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd. Many of these stories contain reference numbers in the text that provide additional information. For example, in the story \The Great Star, !Gaunu, which, Singing, Named The Stars.", one of the references is:
  
  "The stars jjXwahai jjaiti and jjXwhai-@pua were identified as "Altair" or "Alpha Aquilae", and "Gamma Aquilae", respectively, by the late Mr. George Maclear and Mr. Finlay of the Royal Observatory, on October 10, 1873, at Mowbray. jjXwhai gwai was behind a tree and too low to be distinguished."
  
  While this is interesting information, it is not of particular relevance to the story itself. For this reason, and to help improve the flow of the stories, these numbers, as well as their corresponding reference entries, were removed from the text. Many would find this information to be an interesting side note to a story. A feature could be added that would allow a user to insert one of these references into the text of the story or create an additional information page.