Most of us are used to the built-in full-text index available in Lotus Notes; unfortunately the full-text index usually takes information out of context, and time is spent locating specific or relative information.

Two types of relationships
To understand the relationship that the Discovery Server is able to build, we'll look at two different types of search engines we use on a daily basis. The first is robot or spider driven. These are search engine sites that go out and index the contents of Web sites and allow you to search against them for an instance of a phrase. It can be difficult to locate information if you haven't used a precise search term, and you often get results that have nothing to do with your original search. An example of this kind of search engine is Google.com.

The second most popular search engine is a manually maintained index of information. AskJeeves.com is a popular site that grows in data as information is added manually. This can return much more precise and accurate information, but unfortunately, if the question has never been asked before, an answer won't be readily available.

The Discovery Server uses both of these methodologies in the process of building relationships between data, by whom the data was created, and how much this data is utilized.

The Knowledge Map
You access the Knowledge Map (K-map), a browsable and searchable interface to an enterprise taxonomy that presents categories, documents, and people in context, similar in nature to the Yahoo Internet directory. It's pictured in Figure A.

FIGURE A


User profiles contain contact information as well as a listing of affinities defined by the K-Map. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The information presented in the K-map is automatically generated by the Discovery Server. It's also maintained by the Lotus Discovery Server and modified by systems administrators to match an organization's business processes and business rules.

From the K-map, you can navigate through to locate documents, people, categories, and places, or you can perform a search for information. When performing a search, there are several options to filter what kind of information is returned.

Search options include:

• Everything about;
• Documents about;
• Documents authored by;
• People named;
• People who know about;
• People whose profile contains;
• Places about;
• Categories about.

Search results are displayed on four tabs of information: Categories, Documents, People, and Places, as seen in Figure B.

FIGURE B


K-map search results are returned on four tabs, Categories, Documents, People, and Places. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Suppose you performed a search on WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Information or data retrieved by the Discovery Server search engine is ranked by values and returned to you with the highest values at the top. Values are between 0 and 100 and are assigned by default by the Discovery Server, but administrators can change them to match an organization value in an action.