Batch of comments on Monitor MW portal

[emiliom]

Compiling a bunch of suggestions here first, before breaking off into individual, narrower issues. Several are carry overs from BiGCZ portal comments, specially #3. The order below does not reflect any kind of priority, but I've grouped them into issues specific to CUAHSI WDC vs others.

Specific to CUAHSI WDC

1. Implementation of CUAHSI WDC "variables" controlled vocab (and other parameter, like sample medium), via pre-caching and "staging" (rather than relying on the WDC server catalog API). And/or "free text searching"
2. Revisit choice of catalog search API requests, to explore newer ones that are faster, more flexible and more effective
3. Allow users to request the complete time series, or a user-defined period, after the initial, default data load. Otherwise the portal is providing only a limited data visualization capability, and is not telling users about that limitation.
4. Revisit the value and need to present the latest values for each variable. I don't think it adds any value to users, and it kind of forces the architectural choice of issuing requests for data for all variables, all at once -- instead of a smarter, staged set of requests behind the scenes.
   • Related to the problems with request performance, response time

Others, or more general comments

1. Filter out datasets for CINERGI and HydroShare whose extent (bounding box) is much larger than the AOI extent. The extreme case is global-scale datasets
2. In general, a lot of "irrelevant" results are coming through from HydroShare and specially CINERGI. There are multiple reasons for this (eg, very large or incorrect bounding boxes, and Problematic MultiPolygon Responses from CINERGI #6 for CINERGI), and they'll need to be investigated.
3. For CUAHSI (and possibly the other catalogs), it'd be helpful to have a "collapsible" (tree?) mechanism to let the user group and collapse results by source/service (eg, for CUAHSI, NWISDV vs NWISUV)
   • Regarding this suggestion, Arianna commented back in Sept 2017: "I think we could accommodate this neatly in the new filters pane, if it's useful for users to filter by data source."

cc @aufdenkampe

[emiliom]

Worth going over the still-open issues from the MMW "BiG CZ Contract Burndown" milestone would be worthwhile.