Search for "Collectors" - Display name

[Muskovit]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The field “Collectors” in Material Samples > Collecting Event > Collecting Agents with agents from the agents module is not yet included in the search index. Therefore, we cannot perform a targeted search for a specific collector. The workaround of searching for a specific collector via the agent's “uuid” in quotation marks using the global search (as suggested during the Technical Meeting on June 18, 2025) does not work. Using the field “Verbatim Collectors” instead is too inaccurate. A targeted search for a specific agent is particularly important to us as this is one of the most common scientific requests made to curators of historical collections.

Describe the solution you'd like
We suggest to add the field “Collectors” into the search index.

[dshorthouse]

The first question to ask (I think) is if the goal is to search for a Collecting Agent (or any Agent) vs search for objects for which a particular Agent is associated with (eg specimens they collected, identified; photographs they took). The two approaches are different. The need for a two-step search is apparent when the number of Collecting Agents becomes large or if there are many examples of Agents that share the same (or similar) names. For instance, an Agent search index could include all known aliases or other attributes whereas a Material Sample search index that additionally has mappings for their Collecting Agent(s) might not include those same aliases/attributes, or at least would be impractical to include them because triggers to reindex might fire all the time, thus degrading the performance of the system.

I would recommend a dedicated Agent search index whose scored results display a subset of all linked objects for each found agent & then include a link to those types of objects as a filter using the agent's UUID. That way, you could search for agent aliases independent from the material sample index or any other index where an agent is linked. Examples where this becomes useful is if agent aliases are expressed in multiple languages or using many alphabets. It might be handy to copy/paste to search human names using Cyrillic script.

So...you'd find the agent of interest first & then you'd explore the objects they are linked to. Searching for human names is not always as simple as it might first seem; all the more reason to separate the interests of the indices.

Should it be of help to devs, here's an example query in ruby for ES: https://github.com/bionomia/bionomia/blob/22a9a3999d4ab6086fcb02864db3ef59ab625dc3/helpers/query_helper.rb#L52

And the config/mappings whose fields are similar to what's used in DINA's Agent model: https://github.com/bionomia/bionomia/blob/22a9a3999d4ab6086fcb02864db3ef59ab625dc3/lib/elastic/elastic_user.rb#L16

In any case, a new implementation here is going to be required.

[Muskovit]

Our main goal is to search for material samples a particular agent is associated with including additional features if necessary. For example, typical requests made to curators are: "Please send a list of all specimens collected by collector X" and "Do you have any specimens of species X collected by collector Y at locality Z?".

[jgrieb]

I generally agree with @dshorthouse suggestion that it makes sense to separate the search into 2 steps. Once a user has found their agent, in the dina-ui at the agent landing page we could do something similar like we have done for collections:

Only that in our case this button would say e.g. "View material samples collected by this agent" (or other options), and then the user is redirected to the material samples search with the agent's uuid set as a filter collectingEvent->collectors.

This could be a minimal solution to start with. However, I can confirm what @Muskovit writes, right now it is not even possible to use an agent's uuid in the material sample search, it looks like the field collectors is completely filtered out (DINA v1.31, I have not tested whether it used to work in previous versions). I think we should try to fix this and then implement the workaround with the button.

@dshorthouse what if an agent can be uniquely identified for example via their ORCID? Should it not be possible for these cases to allow a 1-step search, so directly `"Do you have any specimens of species X collected by collector with ORCID Y at locality Z?"?

However there might be a technical limitation for this, because in order to add this to the material sample search index we need to resolve: materialSample -> collectingEvent [include attributes] (done) + `->collectingEvent -> collector [include attributes].