The Evidence Tracker site is made up the following key data objects:
Profiles for each of the scorers on InfluenceMap's system and are used for assigning evidence items to scorers. If you do not have a scorer profile and would like one, simply click on the "Create scorer profile" button under the "Quick links" drop-down.
This is the core of ET. Potential Evidence Items (PEIs) are the pieces of online content that may become Evidence items in the LobbyMap database. The PEI list lets you view and filter all PEIs on Evidence Tracker. You can filter PEIs on a number of fields, including for those that are assigned to you, if they have been scored and if they have been dismissed. For most work, it is presumed that scorers will want to filter by PEIs assigned to them, that haven't been scored or dismissed. Hence there is a button straight to this selection at the top of the quick links dropdown.
When you click on an PEI, you can see more detail on the PEI, including the content of the PEI, which source it came from, which entities are tied to the PEI, if it has been scored already and if has been dismissed. There are also a number of actions you can take on the PEI, this includes dismissing it for a given project or all projects, scoring the evidence item or assigning it to someone else. There is also a link to the original PEI, which I suggest everyone clicks on to check there was no text on the original source that was missed by the data gathering code.
Only dismiss a PEI if you are sure they are not relevant to the project you are dismissing them for. If an entity is mentioned but not relevant for your project but may be relevant to other projects, that would be a instance where you would want to dismiss it only for your project.
If you come across an PEI and know it is not relevant to your entity but could be relevant to anther entity on your project, please un-assign yourself and remove the connection to your entity, instead of dismissing the PEI. There is also drop down quick dismiss button on the evidence list page. Please only dismiss a PEI for your project if you are unsure if it may be relevant to anther project.
ET tries to predict what source the PEI is, based on where it came from. However, this is not always straight forward. Fore example, content on a website can be a newsletter and therefor D2, or a statement in a article could be from a CEO and therefor D6. Please always check the source is correct when scoring and refer to the Scoring Resources if unsure.
When an evidence item gets scored in ET, that action gets logged and will appear on the evidence item view. In addition, incoming PEIs will be checked to see if they correspond to any links in the LobbyMap system, any matches found are noted in the PEI view. Be aware that online content can change, so a match found in the LobbyMap system may correspond to new content. ET tries stop duplicates by not saving evidence items that contain the same url and have the same content.
Assignments are key to how PEIs are assigned to scorers by the entities that they score. These assignments are project specific. ET Assignments include lead scorers on the LobbyMap system and any additions to the lead scorer field in the LobbyMap system will be pulled across to ET on daily basis. Assignments can be edited and created by going to the scorer, project or entity pages.
Unlike the lead scorer field on LobbyMap, ET assignments can also have multiple scorers assigned to one entity for a given project. This can be used to give entities multiple scorers if someone wants to share out evidence items. In this approach if one person dismisses a PEI from that entity it will not show up on the other scorers PEI unassessed list. ET's assignments are a more informal marker of who scores what and only impacts the assignment of PEIs in ET. The LobbyMap lead scorer fields should be seen as the official database of who scores which entity.
These are copies of the LobbyMap entities, every day this database is synced with the LobbyMap database so any new entities in the LobbyMap site will appear on Evidence Tracker the next day. Note: Currently ET is connected to an old copy of the LobbyMap database, but once ET is connected to the live database, the daily sync ups will come into place.
Entity Names are the names associated with an entity and used to look for the entity in PEIs. Any PEIs that come from sources run by an entity will automatically be connected to that entity. However, in addition all incoming PEIs are searched for mentions of entity names (Excluding PEIs from D1). Because of this entity names can be used to find matches for alternative names entities might have, as well as any subsidiaries of the entity. There may also be cases where an entity names leads to too many mis-matches. For example, many PEIs have a button stating "Share on Facebook" or something to that effect, so "Facebook" is a bad name to search for in ET, however "Meta" would work.
In ET you can create entity names and run searches for them from the entity profiles. It may take a while for a search of an entity name to run, so please only press the search button once and wait for the search to finish. You should see the results number increase when you refresh the page.
Source Internet objects represent the internet sources ET pulls data from. For the most part each of these represents a different data collection method. These cannot be edited through the interface. Please speak to a member of the tech team if you would like a source added to Evidence Tracker.
Note: Currently social media sites are included as a way of storing social media pages from Brian. However, we cannot currently access data from these sites due to increased protectiveness from Social Media companies over their data.
These are the individual sources that will be searched i.e. a individual domains, news sites, consultations etc. These sources instances are read straight from the ET database by the data collection code, so any new instance added should have it's data appear in the ET database within a day or two. Source instances can be connected to entities, in cases where the entity runs the source i.e a corporate website. In addition, source instances can also be connected to a scorer, this is for cases where that scorer may wants to see all relevant outputs from the source even if it is connected to an entity that they do not score i.e. consultation responses.
Source instances can be created by going to the Source Internet the source instance will belong to. Note: Please do not create source instances if you are not sure of what you are doing. Please speak to Jake if you have any questions.
Terms are used by ET to determine if a evidence item belongs to a project or not. These can be edited or created if deemed necessary. Terms are project and language specific. ET tries to determine the language of incoming PEIs and only checks them for terms of the same language. The "Used in web search" option determines if the term is used in the Google search the D1 data gatherer runs to find D1 results. These terms don't need to be super comprehensive but should just point the Google results in the right direction.