Facet Recommendation

Faceted browsing is a powerful exploration and navigation technique that helps users find information by iteratively displaying relevant topics and choices based on the conceptual dimensions of the data, such as price, size and brand for refrigerators on an ecommerce site.

These data dimensions are called Navigators, and they help users gradually narrow the search without restricting related options. While some UIA engines force customers to use a static approach to defining facets, Attivio AIE provides a dynamic model that automatically determines and updates facets.

This approach avoids the pitfalls of the manual method, which include the requirement that all facets be predefined or fixed, that adding new fields for faceting requires re-indexing content, and that facet relevancy is determined by best-guess at design time, not calculated by the system based on the query results or the content.

Let AIE Do the Work

Attivio offers the power of facets without the administrative hassle. AIE can automatically select, calculate and display the most relevant facets for any given query without the need to predefine or pre-compute the faceted fields. AIE can dynamically recommend the best facets for each query based on the query's results or the full corpus of information. AIE also recommends the order in which the facets should be displayed. For example, a search for "laptop" might recommend the facets "CPU," "screen size," and "weight," whereas a search for "server" might recommend "CPU," "memory," and "number of rack units". The system administrator can also include or preclude certain facets from query results or override the dynamic facet recommendation altogether to create static facets. Supplementing the automatic approach with some manual adjustments is often the best solution.

When you add more content or data to the AIE index,there is no need to re-ingest your entire index to generate additional facets. AIE adapts facets to reflect newly added content and data sources on-the-fly. This enables rapid development and prototyping, which can save you money in R&D costs and improve your time to market for new offerings.

Build Search-Based Applications that Power Your Business

Coupled with other features found only in AIE, such as AIE JOIN and SQL/JDBC support, facet recommendation can be used to build executive dashboards that are easier to use and go beyond showing what happened in the past to help answer questions about why events occurred.

Learn more about AIE Facet Recommendation

In this whiteboard video, Attivio CTO Sid Probstein walks us through the unique capabilities of the AIE Facet Recommendation. Sid will provide an overview of how dynamic facet recommendation works in the Attivio Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) and how it frees up developers from worrying about the underlying data model, allowing them to focus on building feature-rich applications on top of the AIE platform.

Click the image to the right to launch the video.