The Dào of Search

Most modern enterprise search platforms provide some inherent capability to illustrate the shape and nature of the data within. Take for example faceted search.

Job adverts for 'project managers' broken down by category on a popular recruitment site

Facets will quickly break down the dimensions in all the data we’re storing or even just the stuff that meets our search criteria. In either case we can get some form of statistical feedback e.g. on which top-level categories exist, their names and how many documents each represents. Take this search for positions as a ‘project manager’ as an example. Using faceted search, we can quickly see that some of these are are in the ‘Engineering’ field, with still more for IT professionals.

Not only does this give the user insight into what information is available, but also guides them in their search, allowing them to slice and dice the data to get precisely to the information they’re after. The question is, how do we best represent this information and make it useful (and meaningful) to us?

As you saw in Tyler’s previous posts in most cases there might be sufficient utility in just getting the broad strokes, preferably in a manner that minimises the cognitive burden of taking it in. In some cases proportions may give us the visual cues we’re after. For example it may be useful enough for us to see that there are 1) almost no orders pending shipment this week (phew), 2) a bunch in transit, with 3) the vast majority already delivered. And, thanks to faceted search all the detail on each group or dimension is a mere click away.

Facet information displayed with TwigKit as a 3D pie chart

To achieve this, the TwigKit UI libraries provide widgets that will turn facet information from the search platform into pretty pictures, charts and graphs. Traditionally, a developer would have written some code to extract the necessary information from the facet, integrated a visualisation library, and displayed the result on a web page. But we’ve done all that for you.

In the code snippet below you can see how to create visualisations using the TwigKit JSP Tag Library. All you’d need to do is specify which facet to display, the format (such as column, line or pie chart) and the result is an interactive visualisation – where clicking a particular aspect will further refine your search. Easy as pie :)

<widget:facetChart
	type="Column3D"
	facet="${response.facets.manufacturer}"
	numberOfFilters="6"
	color="ffbb33"
	backgroundColor="fbfbfb"
	query="${query}"
	width="700"
	height="250"
	title="Top Manufacturers"
	subTitle="Number of products per manufacturer"
	showAverage="true" />

Simple example of Facet information on products, broken down by manufacturer and represented as a column chart.

The important thing here is that search engines have a myriad of ways to efficiently mine vast volumes of data, providing insights that simply weren’t achievable in the traditional relational paradigm. However it is often the little things that transform that analysis into meaningful, every day tools that truly alters the way we consume information.

Hjortur Stefan Olafsson

Stefan is an architect and developer at TwigKit. He has spent the last few years working with search technologies in various blue-chip organisations and governments around the world. You can keep tabs on him on Twitter.