Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Data Explorer gives end users the ability to comment, tag, and rate con-
tent, as well as to create shared folders for content that they want to share
with other users. All of this user feedback and social content is then fed back
into Data Explorer's relevance analytics to ensure that the most valuable con-
tent is presented to users. Users can also comment on their search results. The
comments are field-security protected, and can be created or viewed only if
the user has the proper permissions. In addition, users with the appropriate
permissions can save results into folders, and those folders can be personal,
shared at the group level, or shared across the enterprise. This makes for a
powerful collaboration environment, where users' profiles can be returned
in search results, based on their activities. Suppose a user named Anna adds
comments and tags including the word “Hadoop” to various documents. Any
search queries including the term “Hadoop” will then return Anna's user profile,
even if there is no mention of Hadoop in her profile data and job description.
Beefing Up InfoSphere BigInsights
Because Data Explorer is now an integrated component of the IBM Big Data
platform, its enterprise-scale indexing and search capabilities also apply to
InfoSphere BigInsights (BigInsights). While the Hadoop technologies upon
which BigInsights is built have tremendous power to run complex workloads
against large volumes of structured and unstructured data, there are use cases
for which Hadoop is not a practical solution. The Hadoop Distributed File
System (HDFS) is designed for large-scale batch operations that run against
most or all of the information in a data set. However, queries involving small
subsets of data in HDFS perform poorly. By indexing content stored in HDFS,
Data Explorer offers a way to address the need for rapid response times without
compromising the strengths of BigInsights.
Moreover, the ability to extract, recognize, and leverage metadata can greatly
enhance search precision, usability, and relevance. In fact, search can add struc-
ture to unstructured content by recognizing entities and other important terms
in natural language text. Data Explorer adds semantic capabilities, such as cat-
egorization, clustering, and faceted navigation, enabling you to browse search
results by topic, or to navigate to a single result without ever typing a query.
