Searching in more than one user's annotations

[OleMussmann]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
At the moment you can search for annotations of a specific user. It would be handy to be able to optionally search all annotations, also from other users.

Describe the solution you'd like
There already is a check-box for "Current document only". A second check-box "Current user only" or "Search all users" could further adjust the search scope.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Switching between different user's annotations and then searching there. But this is time-consuming.

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• Also allow curators to view annotations of other users in the "open document dialog" and in relevant access checks
• Add button to toggle between searching the current user and all users (optionally a list where users to be search can be selected)
• Add some indicator in which user's document a result was found to the results list

[reckart]

That would need to be limited to managers and maybe curators then because annotators should remain isolated from each other.

[reckart]

@OleMussmann can you more closely describe in which situation and for what purpose a user would want to search annotation from other annotators?

[OleMussmann]

@reckart We have a team of experts annotating many short bodies of text. It would be nice to be able to more closely collaborate on the annotations and learn from the other annotators. It would indeed make sense to have these elevated rights in a separate role. This would enable the working mode "expert annotation" in addition to the existing "crowd annotation".

[reckart]

@OleMussmann Please try turning on the experimental Curation Sidebar functionality and have a look at it. Users able to use it must have the Curator role. When you use the sidebar, make sure that it is configured to My document in its settings (I think the settings is currently not persisted...). This sidebar allows your curators users to see annotations from other users similar to annotation suggestions. They can merge them into their own data, but they cannot manipulate them. They can also not search them. But I still think you might find it interesting and would like to hear your feedback on the functionality.

[OleMussmann]

Thank you @reckart , I'll try that out.

[OleMussmann]

Curation is an interesting feature for merging the work of other annotators. It does not work so well for our use-case though, which is multiple experts annotating and learning from each other. I understand that implementing this would be probably quite some work, but just for completeness' sake for this issue, it would be nice to have some wider search options:

• Current document only
• Including other's annotations
  • Dropdown: list_of_users + all