Lazurite in Action
Lazurite has been designed to provide the range of functionality needed for documentation of analytical material while following common software conventions, making it powerful but easy to use. This brief presentation of some of the program’s features includes full-size screenshots of Lazurite in action; click on the thumbnails to view them.
Lazurite is structured so that it gives a series of ‘views’ on the information, such as this example of a typical ‘Samples Analysis’ page. Text-based information is presented alongside the corresponding images. A summary of the sample and its analyses give quick access to information such as when and where and by whom the sample was taken, a context image of sampling site and so forth. Many of the text fields can be fully formatted with changes of font, embedding of tables, while the thumbnail images can be opened into full-size versions.
An especially powerful feature of Lazurite is the interactive mapping function. This works in a similar fashion to the hyperlinks in images familiar in websites. Here, it allows the user to create images that will link to other parts of the database, or display additional information. It might be a map of sampling sites linked to the sample data itself, or an overlay diagram showing condition, or the results of some piece of spatial analysis like element mapping.
Among the facilities provided in Lazurite is a search function modelled on familiar web search engines. Words or phrases may be entered to scan the entire database, giving a list of ‘hits’. The search list is active and clicking on an entry will take the user directly to the information.
Images and text are not the only types of data that can be incorporated. Resources such as word-processing documents and spreadsheet files, analytical instrument files and web links can also be imported. Activating these links will open the file in its original software, or immediately access a web page.
Numerous other functions are built into Lazurite to make the job of studying and interpreting the contents easier and more productive. As an example, images may be calibrated to their true size and then measured directly in the program. Other features include the availability of specialist dictionaries to broaden searches or help control terminology to common standards.