Update overview, mission, scope, and roadmaps

[niksirbi]

Description

What is this PR

• Bug fix
• Addition of a new feature
• Other: documentation

Why is this PR needed?

Over the past months, the project's scope has shifted somewhat, in two major ways:

• we are not so neuro-centric, which is a good thing as movement is already being used by researchers in other fields, such as ethology, and could be useful for anyone studying animal behaviour
• while our initial focus was specifically on "pose tracks", we now also support tracked bounding boxes, and have plans for supporting tracked segmentation masks.

What does this PR do?

This PR updates the following:

• The project's tagline and overview in README.md and on the website's homepage
• The project's mission and scope statements
• The roadmaps

In general, "pose tracks" are replaced by the more general term "motion tracks" (which I define in the scope), unless we are specifically talking about tracks produced with pose estimation. Moreover, most mentions of neuroscience are removed, and in most cases I simply refer to the "study of animal behaviour".

The scope and v1.0 roadmap are extended somewhat, because now we have a more defined vision of what movement is and should be.

As a minor fix, I've also changed movement to be consistently rendered as monospace (when referring to the package) in the homepage and throughout the Community section. I make an exception for when it's rendered as a hyperlink (hyperlink rendering takes precedence over monospace, because both together looks ugly).

Caveats

One more "generalisation of scope" is to also include human motion tracking. That said, since our current primary focus is animals, and we haven't yet added much human-specific features, I've chosen to keep the "animal" mentions in the text. This "generalisation" may yet happen in the future though.

Notes for reviewers

While I'll specifically tag @adamltyson as a reviewer, I'd like everyone in @neuroinformatics-unit/behaviour to take a look at this and give a thumbs up, as this represents an important change in the project's direction. Or rather, the change has already happened, but how we talk about it is important.

How has this PR been tested?

Docs were rendered locally.

Is this a breaking change?

Not in the API sense.

Does this PR require an update to the documentation?

It is in itself an update of documentation.

Checklist:

• [ N/A] The code has been tested locally
• [N/A] Tests have been added to cover all new functionality
• The documentation has been updated to reflect any changes
• The code has been formatted with pre-commit

[codecov]

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 99.78%. Comparing base (174817d) to head (62db973).
Report is 2 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

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  Coverage   99.78%   99.78%           
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  Files          14       14           
  Lines         912      912           
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  Misses          2        2           

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[adamltyson]

Not sure if this was ready to review, but looks good anyway! Some tiny comments.

Once this is merged, we should announce the plans in relevant places to solicit feedback.

[niksirbi]

Not sure if this was ready to review, but looks good anyway! Some tiny comments.

Once this is merged, we should announce the plans in relevant places to solicit feedback.

Thanks for the comments. I hadn't marked it "Ready" because of a failing CI job, but it was ready content-wise.

What places do you have in mind?

[adamltyson]

What places do you have in mind?

Zulip, SWC slack, neuromethods slack, behaviour forum, bluesky/mastodon. Partly as advertising, but also to make sure we get feedback from the user base before we build things!

[niksirbi]

Zulip, SWC slack, neuromethods slack, behaviour forum, bluesky/mastodon. Partly as advertising, but also to make sure we get feedback from the user base before we build things!

I'm considering to do that alongside the next release. Something like: "we have a bunch of new features now, check them out" and also "we have updated our scope, and we'd welcome your feedback"?

[sfmig]

thanks for this @niksirbi!

I like the name of "motion tracks" for the general case. It's mostly minor comments and just one "more meaty" bit under scope.

[sfmig]

Suggested change

	or 3D (x, y, z). The pose and mask representations also carry some information
	about the individual's posture.
	or 3D (x, y, z).

[sfmig]

Suggested change

	generate these representations from video data by detecting body parts and
	generate keypoint representations from video data by detecting body parts and

[sfmig]

(but maybe I would consider removing this sentence entirely)

[niksirbi]

Well the two examples mentioned here do produce "keypoints", but not all "animal tracking frameworks" do...
I will decided on whether to keep this sentence depending on what happens to the above section (the one with the long discussion).

[lochhh]

general note: I'm seeing a mixture of BrE and AE (e.g. standardized, analyzing, visualization, behavioral, behavior)

[niksirbi]

general note: I'm seeing a mixture of BrE and AE (e.g. standardized, analyzing, visualization, behavioral, behavior)

Good point! I will switch to BrE for everything I catch

[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
0 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud

[niksirbi]

Thanks all! I've dealt with all the comments, so this is ready to merge now.