About Heurist

The Heurist open source, academic knowledge-management system is a flexible online data analysis and visualisation platform that empowers researchers and other users to quickly design, create and develop single-user or multiple-user databases (as simple or as complex as they like) without any programming experience.

Heurist incorporates features such as repeatable fields, simple creation and use of relationships (record linking), automatic mapping and timelines, user-defined reports, on-the-fly record structure modification and sharing of pre-configured database schemas through a central clearing-house. For the more adventurous, Heurist has facilities for data import (CSV, KML etc.), feeds, annotations, constraining relationships, fuzzy date recording, hierarchical term trees, external file linking, XSL processing, XML output streams, sophisticated reporting and publishing, addition of new analysis modules, export of XForms specifications for use on Android mobile devices and a mobile application for delivering cultural tours.

You can quickly get started building your database; start from scratch or simply copy an existing database structure and tailor this to your needs.

You design the database by selecting or defining the following key building blocks:

• Record types: The entities or research objects you wish to capture. For example: Article.
• Field types: The properties or attributes that describe your records. For example, Title, Author, Year, Journal, Volume etc. You can control field usage (e.g. required, recommended or optional, single value or repeatable value etc.). Composite titles can be constructed from field values (e.g. Author-Year-Title).

You can choose from an extensive base of predefined record and fields types that cover a wide range of typical data requirements: constrained or free text, numeric, date, y/n, enumerated lists, geographic objects etc. If a field or record type does not exist, you can create one, and reuse it across the database or other databases.

If you decide to change your data model later you can update the record/field types, without having to rebuild the database or re-enter data. In this way the database can grow as your research progresses. Changing database definitions does not invalidate existing data. Once your database has been created, data can be entered manually, or by importing data sets, such as CSV (text) and KML (geographic), from structured or semi-structured data collections, or by harvesting data (e.g. web links and emails).

Getting Assistance

There are a number of places you can get assistance with using Heurist:

• This Help documentation. You can browse the help topics, or use the Search field to find particular items of interest.
• The Heurist Project Page here provides links for new users.
• The Heurist Network web site here.
• The Heurist Team. You can contact the Heurist Team for assistance with any queries you may have, via the web site Contact page here, or email info@heuristscholar.org.

Created with the Personal Edition of HelpNDoc: Create help files for the Qt Help Framework