modifying labelset and add label "subsets"

[Clara Diaz]

Hi all, 

I'm working on mesophotic reef data and would like to use CoralNet to assess the diversity of the ecosystems.  I would have two questions: 

- There's a lot of species that aren't already in the labelset, I think that this part is fine as we can add a new label; but what I understood is that we need to have our labelset ready before starting to annotate. However, we often "discover" species on our images as we go during the annotation process. Do you know if it's possible at all to add new labels during the annotation process? 

- As you certainly know, it's hard to go down to the species level when identifying from images only. However, it's still possible to recognise that two specimens belong to the same genus but not the same species, so it would be for example Acropora 1 and Acropora 2. Is it possible to do this at all? 

Thank you very much in advance! 

Clara

[Stephen Chan]

Hi Clara,

1. Yes, you're free to add new labels to your labelset during the annotation process. Just be aware that changing your labelset (adding or removing labels) means that the automated classifiers for the source have to be reset, meaning the existing classifiers will be deleted and a new one will be trained. However, this won't have any effect on your confirmed annotations.

2. I do remember user feedback similar to this in the past, but I guess it hasn't been brought up often enough. Unfortunately though, I can't think of a very good way to do this on CoralNet. Even if there was, we don't yet have an easy way to go back and automatically convert all of the "Acropora 1" annotations to a different Acropora label. So your best bet is probably just using the genus-level Acropora label temporarily, and then when you're able to identify the individual species, take another pass through the Acropora annotations and change them to the species-specific labels.