Percevia Search Engine and Bird Field Guide

New Birds Added August 14, 2005

2005-08-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

Here are the new bird added to the Percevia Birds of North America database on August 14, 2005.

Common Cuckoo Breeding Male

Fork-tailed Swift Breeding Male

Groove-billed Ani Breeding Male

Mangrove Cuckoo Breeding Male

Oriental Cuckoo Breeding Male

Plain-capped Starthroat Breeding Male

Smooth-billed Ani Breeding Male

White-eared Hummingbird Breeding Male

White-throated Needletail Breeding Male

Xantus's Hummingbird Breeding Male

New Birds Added June 26, 2005

2005-06-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

Here are the new bird added to the Percevia Birds of North America database on June 26, 2005

Arizona Woodpecker Breeding Male

Buff-collared Nightjar Breeding Male

Common Pauraque Breeding Male

Red-cockaded Woodpecker Breeding Male

Three-toed Woodpecker Breeding Male

Improvements to Percevia June 2005

2005-06-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

In the last month we have made a number of significant improvements to Percevia. Be sure and check out the new rating system on the species account pages.

1. Revamped the GUI in several ways for example the group menus are on the left now and they remember the last group you opened if you come back later or use the back button. http://tinyurl.com/976ge

2. Moved the Match window to the top of the screen and changed the way it works so it now presents the matches using "paging" like Google does. You no longer have to wait for all the birds to fill up the window. You can click a link to see all the birds if you want.

3. Added a rating system to the bird species accounts so you can now vote on the quality of the illustration as well as leave comments about the page. Please when you visit a bird page let us know how we are doing on the illustrations and content. It takes just one click to vote.
http://tinyurl.com/4zgj3

4. News: The North Dakota Department of Health West Nile Virus Surveillance Program is using Percevia to identify birds.
http://www.ndwnv.com/default.htm

5. We now have 778 birds in the database, so we are almost done with North America. We will begin adding European birds in a few weeks and convert our units to the metric system (English units will be there too).

6. Added a FAQ where you can read a discussion about where Percevia came from, and how it differs from other web sites that claim to offer searching. This should also clear up some confusion about the non commercial and free status of this site. http://www.percevia.com/FAQ.htm

7. Added a new attribute called "Readily Eats" which contains food items for a large number of birds. http://tinyurl.com/7eroc

8. Created a Forum for asking questions about a bird you want to identify, leave suggestions and more. http://www.percevia.com/forums/forums/

New birds added for June 2005

2005-06-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

Here are the 24 birds we have added to the database so far in June 2005:

http://www.percevia.com/explorer/db/birds_of_north_america_western/rl/118/01S0200F00G-OR/0/24/attrs.aspx#history

And here are the five birds we added last week:

Gilded Flicker Breeding Male

Golden-fronted Woodpecker Breeding Male

Great Kiskadee Breeding Male

Ladder-backed Woodpecker Breeding Male

Rose-throated Becard Breeding Male

Search When You Know a Field Mark

2005-06-04T20:24:00.000-07:00

The best way to find a bird using the Percevia search engine is when you have noticed a few of the birds field marks. Field marks are attributes of the bird like color, shape, pattern and so on.

Search When You Know a Field Mark There are two steps required when searching with field marks:

You pick a field mark.
You select a value for it.
Repeat Until Found.

Search for a Bird. For example lets say we saw a bird in our backyard that looked like this, and that it was eating at our bird feeder:

Lets also say all we noticed is that this bird had a kind of crested crown, like a spiked hairdo, and we also noticed that the color of this crown was very dark, maybe black.

Okay now look how easy it is to find that bird.

First a word about the interface. Note in the illustration below there are two basic windows.

Match Window. The window on top always shows the first six birds in the database, the rest of them are hidden but can be seen by clicking See All Matches. If you click that now it will display all the birds in the database, which is a lot, so hold on. We only show six to keep things from getting overwhelming.

Field Mark or Attribute Window. The window below the Match window contains all the field marks you can select for your search, which will narrow the number of birds in the Match window. These marks are divided into groups, and you can open a group by clicking on its name. The default group is called Common Characteristics.

Lets go back to finding our bird.

2. Since we saw this bird in our backyard we can start by picking the Backyard Feeder attribute. Select the check box Yes, then click on the Next button.

The search engine will now reduce the database down to just birds that feed at backyard feeders which surprisingly is a very small subset of the over 800 birds in North America. Birds like a lot of variety in there diet.

1. You can see this above the Match window message 61 Matches. Note also the six birds that are displayed have changed, now you are seeing the first six which feed at feeders. At this point you could click on Show All Matches and see all 61 birds. Maybe the one you want pops out at you. If so you could click on it and its species account page would appear in the browser, with illustrations, field mark information, its call or song to listen to, etc. But that is still a lot of birds so lets use the search engine to narrow it to a much smaller list.

2. Also note the small history list at the top of the Match window. This lets you know what you have selected so far, it shows the name of the database followed by Backyard Feeder. There is one more new window that has been added. Its called Specified Criteria and is located at the bottom of the Attribute window. Its a detailed description of what you have selected, showing the name of the Field Mark and the values that have been selected so far. At any time you can click on the Edit button and go back and change what you selected.

We are making good progress. With just a few clicks we have eliminated hundreds of birds.

Pick the Head Pattern. The head is a great place to start when trying to identify a bird so lets select that as our next attribute to narrow the search. Click on the Pattern group and then click on the Head Pattern field mark (icon). This will bring up the values for the Head Pattern field mark as shown below.

1. We now see the various head patterns. Note the one called Crested or Plumed. That is the one we want, so we click in its check box which will select it.

2. Click the Next button.

Pick the Crown Color. Remember we noticed the crest was dark, so lets use Crown color to find just those birds that have a black crown. So begin by opening the Head group.

1. Click on the Crown color icon.

This will open the color choices for the crown. Note that there are a limited set of colors. Percevia has eliminated colors that will not help narrow the search. Its one of the cool features of the search engine.

1. Select Black and click the Next button.

Found it - Steller's Jay.

After clicking the Next button the search engine eliminated all birds that feed from backyard feeders which have crested black crows. It found one bird, the Steller's Jay and so it presents the Species Account page for that bird, as shown below.

There are several tabs at the top of the page for learning more about this bird. Here is what they mean.

1. Species Overview. Basic information about the bird, including description, range and habitat, a link to listen to the call, a range map, and more.

2. Identification. Extensive details about the size, shape and colors of the bird.

3. Behavior. How the bird lives, its lifestyle, feeding, breeding, nesting and so on. Links to web sites about the bird, number of eggs, egg color and much more.

4. Portrait. A full size color portrait of the bird that you can print out.

5. New Search. Restart the search from scratch.

6. Glossary. Definitions of bird terminology.

7. Print it. A printer friendly version of this page.

Now try to find a bird yourself.

Mitch

Search When You Know a Bird's Name

2005-06-04T18:49:00.000-07:00

I want to tell you about some cool changes we have made to Percevia to make your searching more enjoyable. First lets take a look at the three ways you can search, using the bird database as our example.

Search When You Sort of Know a Bird's Name. At the top of every page is something we call Quick Search. This simple looking text field is actually magical. With it you can enter the enter the name of any bird, even if you dont know exactly how to spell it, and the software will try to guess what you mean and automatically present a list of likely names to choose from in a drop down menu. Here is how to use it.

1. Select the database you wish to use from the drop down menu called Select Database. In this case we selected Birds of North America (there are several others, including a Laptop Buyer's Guide, World Facts, etc.) but we will ignore them for now. However they work the same way.

2. Type the name of the bird you are thinking of in the field called Search Term.

Thats all there is to it.

As you type your name a drop down menu will appear under the Search Term field with a list of the birds the seach engine thinks you are looking for. If you keep typing the list of possible birds will grow shorter. You don't have to type dashes. This effect is often called autocomplete. At any time if you see your bird on the list you can click on the name and the species account for that bird will appear in your browser in a new window.

What could be more simple?

New changes to Percevia

2005-05-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I posted a message to a number of birding newsgroups about some changes we made to Percevia, our bird ID engine

http://www.percevia.com

That message generated dozens of replies from the lists, almost all positive, for which I am most grateful.

Who would have thought a kindergarten teacher would present the most obvious flaw in the program? She pointed out that the Match window that shows the birds you have found was hidden away at the side of the search page, so she did not notice that it was being updated! We took her observations and several other’s from this list and revamped the interface again. The changes we made might seem subtle but I believe that they make a huge difference in the usability of the program, and make it more suitable to young people who are not so savvy of internet applications, yet who see things we as adults miss. Who was it that said youth is wasted on the young?

Changes we made from list feedback:

o Moved the match window to the top of the browser.
http://tinyurl.com/5sbm7

o Added a history display at the top of the attribute window so you can see your progress in searching.

o Put the QuickSearch box at the top of the screen in the banner area. Here you can enter the name of any bird in the database and the system will attempt to autocomplete the name of the bird you are looking for. Click on that name and the species account page opens. We are using a technique called asynchronous client side access, which is something that Google has pioneered. It allows instant responses to your typing without having to wait for the server to respond. Give it a try and you will see what I mean.

o Added a drop down list so you can switch to a different database to search (we have several).

o Made the point to start more obvious (Begin Here – Select an Attribute.

And here are some of the prior developments:

o Side by side Comparison Grid: Example of four birds: http://tinyurl.com/8nkky

o Online tutorial/help: http://www.percevia.com/Help_Web_Client/Help_Web_Client.htm

o Blog:
http://percevia.blogspot.com

Thanks to everyone here for the continuing support. If there is any thing else you want me to change just send me an email directly.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Waite
Sausalito, California
www.percevia.com

The Size Question

2005-05-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

A person asked about using the Size attribute:

"In the size attributes, is there a better way to visually express bird size than the images used? A friend using that attribute refused to select medium because she knew what she saw was not a duck."

The Size attribute presents five images representing one of five sizes, Large (16 - 32 inches), Medium (9 - 16 inches), and so on. The image itself is symbolic, it doesn't mean you are picking a duck when you select Medium for example. Its just represents something in that range. Perhaps there is a better way to represent size? Actually there already is.

But first a caution. There are some weaknesses with the Size attribute. Its is fine when you know the bird falls into the middle of one of the size ranges, but what if its on the edge of a range?

A better attribute to use is the one called Length Range. This is found in the Body Group. There is also a similar one called Length which is found in the Extras Group. Length Range represents all the different sizes a particular bird can have, for example a sparrow might be between 5 and 6 inches in length. The database stores two values for almost every bird. The Length attribute is a single number that represents the average length of a bird.

Visually on the page these attributes present two "sliders" -- one called Minimum and one called Maximum. You slide each pointer to the closest value you believe the bird's minimum and maximum size is, then click Next. You can see the actual values appear in small boxes to the right of the slider. Thus if you think the bird is between 8 3/4 inch and 9 1/2 inch you can move the sliders to these positions.

In doing so you will isolate birds that are either an average size between those two numbers, or in the case of Length Range, actually vaires in size between those two values.

By the way when you use the sliders you will notice that it is not a linear representation but rather skips some values. Thats becasue it represents the actual values in the database. This is a very slick feature as you can't pick a length value that does not exist.

I hope this clears up using Size vs Length for identifying a bird.

Of course that does not help your friend who is confused by the duck. Perhaps we need to add a footnote to the images that they are symbolic.

The Compare Feature

2005-05-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Compare Feature

I wanted to tell you about a new feature of Percevia that lets you compare objects side by site. Its called, tada, Compare. I'll show you an example using the Birds of North America database.

On the search page in the Match window you can see that each object has a check box under it. This is for selecting it. To compare selections follow these steps.

1. Check any number of boxes.
2. Click the Compare Selections button.

This is shown below:

Once you do this a page should appear with all the objects (birds) you selected displayed in side by side comparison grid. Click this link to see how it will look: Comparison Grid.

To compare other birds, click the Show All button, then select just the birds you want to compare and click the Compare button.

This feature is useful when you have narrowed your search down to 2 to 10 or so objects (birds) and would like to just inspect them visually for the differences.

A Little History of Percevia

2005-05-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

This blog provides information about a new type of search engine called Percevia. Essentially the Percevia™ search engine offers a way to search interactive media that gurantees you will always get a result.

Take a look at the example we created with Percevia for a web-based bird field guide to identify birds. The beauty of this engine is no more “zero matches” or thousands of matches. The engine uses a parametric "step-by-step" approach that helps you quickly narrow down your search with just a few clicks so you can identify any object in seconds. The Percevia site is designed to help you understand the our technology and how you can use it to power your web site. The bird search engine is just one of many examples, check these other databases. You'll find a Laptop Buyer's Guide, Movie Finder, World Fact database, even a database for identifying firearms.

Before you read this blog I would like to tell you a little history of how Percevia and the bird search engine got created. If you don't care about the past, ramblings of a technologist, or the origins of dreams, just click here to get started on the web search tutorial. However you might want to read this as it shows how frustration can be turned to inspiration, and inspiration can enable a new technology for making things work better.

The Bird, the Rain and the Pocket PC

The inspiration for Percevia came from a tiny electronic device that I carried in my pocket called a PDA, also known as a "Palm Pilot" or, if you are a Microsoft fan, a "Pocket PC". If you have not heard of these contraptions I suggest you take a look at one, its like having a laptop computer with you at all times. Anyway it was a dark rainy night. Well actually it was not that dark and not that rainy but it might as well have been--I was cold, muddy and frustrated, hiking in the hills of California, and trying the best I could to identify an elusive bird fleeting about in the branches of a redwood tree. Like most "birders" I carried a copy of Tory Petersen's "Field Guide to the Birds of North America", a classic book full of beautiful paintings of birds with paragraphs describing each in great detail.

There was only one problem. The bird would not stand still long enough to look it up.

The Trouble with Books

"That's the trouble with books", I thought. They're great when you have loads of time to sit and turn pages. But when you can only catch a momentary glance at the bird, they are the pits. Flipping through hundreds of pages while trying to remember the color of the bird you saw, its shape, bill, the kind of call it made--all fade from your memory. Not to mention how confusing it is to see a Duck, a Hawk and so on when all you want is a perching bird.

I sat down on a wet log. The PDA bulged in my back pocket. It gave me an idea--would it be possible to use my Pocket PC as a "digital field guide" to help identify the bird? Could I take advantage of a mobile device's searching features to narrow in on the bird I am trying to identify faster than I could with a book? Could I put the sounds the bird makes into the device so I could play it back in the field and see if the bird recognizes it? Is there a way I could indicate to the device just a few of the field markings and characteristics of the bird so I could match it quickly? It seemed like a good idea but I was not sure the PDA technology had enough power to perform these functions, and had my doubts about how to type information into such a tiny device. While some of these PDA's have keyboards, they are incredibly tiny, too tiny for my fat fingers.

The Dearth of Good Search Engines and the Birth of Percevia

My first thought was could it be set up as to require no typing, so you could just touch the screen, or tap it with the stylus. To do this I would need a way to indicate the bird's attributes visually, and I was not sure that could be done easily either. I started by looking at all the web-based bird search engines as well as CD ROM software. I discovered they all had a major flaw--you would enter all the field marks ahead of time, everyone you noticed, usually by clicking check boxes, then hit the search button. If you did not select enough characteristics you would get back way too many birds. If you selected too many characteristics you would frequently end up with "No Bird Meets Your Criteria" as an answer.

Frustrated, I knew there had to be a better way. Then it hit me--make the search more of a step by step process, allowing you to pick one attribute at a time: color, location, pattern, eye color, size, wing shape, etc. That way the search would narrow a list down and there would always be a valid result. One great side effect of this approach would be that I could eliminate field mark attributes after each search step that no longer applied to the bird I was looking for. That would mean each step would only present marks that where valid so if I got to the third step and it was "color" I would only see the colors of the birds I had narrowed the match down to, rather then all of them. In fact if the birds where all the same color that field mark would not even appear. Would that not be cool?

Rentacoder and Flash

I started building a mock up of my idea using a multimedia tool called Macromedia Flash. Then I posted it on the on the net in a few web sites I use for renting programmer talent, one great one called Rentacoder. My idea inspired a lot of programmers and eventually a very good one who specialized in mobile devices, Robert Levy. We started working on a real working prototype. Then we realized something--this idea did not need to be limited to birds, it could be used to identify objects in any kind of collection--be it cars, computers, coins, stamps, trees, movies, etc. Any collection that had a set of common characteristics was a candidate. At that point I decided to build more general purpose search engine, and use the bird database as a primary example.

Outsourcing Illustrations

Since all good field guides start with excellent drawings or photographs, and I personally prefer illustrations because they make it easier to emphasize the field marks, I started searching for talented artists and immediately hit a wall. I discovered that drawing birds is a very difficult job--feathers are hard to draw--a typical illustration takes well over a day to finish (I now know why Mr. Audubon spent his entire life drawing). Given the number of birds I needed was well over 900 for North America, I had to find a solution that I could afford. Then I heard about outsourcing. I don’t want to start a political war here, but in this particular case if I was restricted to artists in the USA I would not be able to create this engine, so I did not feel I was taking anyone's job away. I used a cool web site called Elance to post my idea and quickly artists from all over the world to help me: India, Argentina, Russia, and China. The best artist, and the one responsible for 50% of my drawings, came from the Ukraine.

Poor PDAs

At the time we started this work in 2001, the processing power of the PDA technology was not fast enough to handle the graphics, so we decided to first build the software on a laptop PC platform, then we would scale it down to the PDA later. This would give the PDA technology time to mature and at the same time we would learn more about the user interface. The desktop version was completed in January of 2003.

All along I had been adding new illustrations, bird calls and ornithological information to the bird database; by the time we where done it was up to 400 birds. That was another ah ha moment--we realized that the bird database was in every way superior to all similar products on the market, and would make a great resource for others to use. Our business plan is not to sell databases but the technology for building them, and so we decided to make the Birds of North American (Western Edition) database available for free educational use. But then we had another problem.

Too Big for a CD ROM

The size of the database had grown to over 100 megabytes and thus distribution would be a problem. Sure we could use CD ROMs, but we where updating it all the time so a CD ROM would quickly be out of date. The solution was to make a web-based version of the search engine that could be accessed by any browser. This solved the PDA problem as well since, with a little modification, we could use the browser in the Palm or Pocket PC to access the same web site. In January of 2004 we launched Percevia.com. From this site you can access the search engine, and the bird database, as well as several others. We made our Field Guide to Birds of North America our best example of the Percevia technology. The database of is freely accessible to anyone interested in learning about birds or just identifying them. At this time our goal is to get feedback on the product--we would like to know your impressions, what you like or dislike, improvements, mistakes, anything.

SQL Enterprise Edition

In March of 2005 we converted our Percevia database format to SQL and made a new Enterprise edition available.

Forums

To make feedback easy we set up the Percevia Forums where you can leave your feedback.I hope you find this bird search engine useful, and look forward to any comments you have.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Waite

Mitch Waite Group
160 C Donahue Street
Suite 226
Sausalito CA 94965
415 888 3233
email: mitch@percevia.com, web: http://www.percevia.com/

P.S. The Percevia bird identification software is being used by the students at Piedmont High School for their 39th Annual Bird Calling Contest, which is featured each year on David Letterman's TV show.