Here’s what you can expect from the most recent updates to Open Supply Hub:

Interaction Improvements:

• Embedded Maps: In order to comply with GDPR requirements, customizable fonts for Embedded Maps are now being hosted on OS Hub servers that reside in Europe. This means that information from a user’s computer is not shared with third parties when they configure an Embedded Map.
• Search Results: When using the Contributor filter in Open Supply Hub, the contributor's lists are sorted from newest to oldest, instead of alphabetically. This makes it easier to find the most recent data even when the list name does not include date information.
• Facility Claiming: Throughout 2023, the OS Hub team worked to identify opportunities to improve the Facility Claim experience for users that want to claim their facility (note: you need to be an owner or senior manager of a facility in order to claim it). Much of this work is still yet to come, but some small changes have been introduced to reduce unnecessary or redundant information in the claim form, such as contact information and preferred contact method. OS Hub relies on email communication when necessary to facilitate the claims review process.
• Platform Translation: The OS Hub site previously used a third party plug-in to provide translated content. In order to avoid compatibility issues with the site and translated content, this plug-in has been removed. Users can continue to access translated content using the built in translation functionality provided by their browser. Need assistance with using the platform in a language other than English? Contact our team.

Technical / Backend Updates:

• Data Moderation Tools: Data moderators on the OS Hub team play an important role in maintaining data quality, and the volume of data they review and moderate on a daily basis is consistently growing. In order to make it easier for data moderators to identify and merge duplicates, an admin feature that enables merging from the search results page has been added.

• Tile Caching: Tile caching functionality for the map was previously supported by built-in Django functionality. A correlation between the generation of new map tiles and site outages was observed in December 2023. This led to the creation of a separate tile caching table to reduce the frequency of needing to generate tiles from scratch.

• Architectural Updates: OS Hub relies on a matching system that processes incoming data and identifies matches with existing data in the database. In order to improve performance and make changes to the front-end and matching system easier to implement in the future, architectural changes have been made; these include: decoupling Terraform and Django environments, implementing Kafka, building a microservice for the matching system that runs independently of the front-end, and enabling A/B testing so that results of production and test models can be easily compared.

Resolved Bugs:

• Embedded Map users may have experienced timeout issues when trying to configure their Embedded Map from November-December 2023 due to an empty table in the user’s account that prevented content from populating on the Embedded Map configuration page.

• An issue that prevented facility claimants from updating information about their facility (such as website, name and address) on the facility claim page has been resolved.

• An issue with the Contributor Type filter that caused certain results matching the filter criteria to be suppressed has been resolved.

• During November and December 2023, OS Hub experienced increased website outages for brief periods of time. This was related to the allocation of shared resources that ran both the front-end and OS Hub’s matching system, as well as the method used to cache map tiles. Architecture changes related to the matching system and tile caching have significantly improved site performance.

New features and updates like these are often built based on feedback from OS Hub users. If you have any questions about these updates or would like to make a suggestion for future improvements, please contact us.