During the development phase, you can add Autonomy portlets to allow your portal users access to search functions. You can also build your own portlets or customize existing ones.
Before you add and create search capabilities within your portal, you need to ensure your development environment has the necessary tools and the proper settings. Specifically, you need to add the Autonomy portlets to your web application library, and ensure that search features are optimized for your environment.
Configuring Search Capabilities in Your Development Environment
Running Autonomy’s search services and BEA’s full-text search capabilities while developing your portal could use unnecessary memory resources. If you do not need to run search capabilities continuously in your development environment, it is recommended that configure a staging environment for your Autonomy search features, see Staging Search Capabilities.
Optionally, you could also disable search within your development environment. Disabling search involves disabling BEA’s full-text search as well as turning off Autonomy’s search services.
Disabling BEA’s Full-Text Search
To disable BEA’s full-text search,
Start your portal domain.
Start the WebLogic Portal Administration Console.
Select Content > Content Management from the navigation menu at the top of the console.
Select Manage | Repositories.
In the resource tree, click the repository for which you want to disable full-text search.
In the Advanced section, click Advanced to view the Edit Advanced Properties for Repository dialog.
In the Edit Advanced Properties for Repository dialog, edit the properties listed in Table 3-1.
Table 3-1 Advanced Repository Properties
Advanced Property
What it does:
Search Indexing Enabled
Allows content to be indexed for portal search. This enables portal developers to use full-text content search in any portlets that they develop.
Full-Text Search Enabled
Enables users to search the repository using the full-text of the content.
When finished making changes, click Save.
Your modifications display in the Advanced section of the Summary page.
Note:
After you make any changes to repository properties, Portal Administration Console users must log out and log back in to view the changes.
Disabling Autonomy’s Services
You can disable Autonomy’s search services. When you disable Autonomy’s services, the following features will not be available:
Full Text Search on a BEA repository
Full Text Search within the WebLogic Portal Groupspace application
Enterprise Search within the WebLogic Portal Groupspace application
Autonomy portlets
Any application/portlet which uses the Autonomy API
To disable Autonomy’s services:
Stop your portal domain.
Set the following environment variable on your portal domain server: WLP_SEARCH_OPTION=none
Restart your portal domain.
Installing Autonomy Portlets
Several Autonomy portlets ship with WebLogic Portal. In order to use these portlets within your portal application, you must first install and configure them.
For additional information about configuring these portlets, see the Autonomy Portlets for WebLogic 9.2 Guide or the Autonomy Portlets User Guide.
The 2D Cluster Map is used to identify conceptual similarities and differences between clusters. Also based on JSP, the landscape is generated from the inter-relationships between clusters and the documents contained within those clusters. Designed to provide a single overview of the clusters contained within the data, clusters that are close together correlate to higher degrees of similarity, whilst dissimilar clusters are situated further apart. By scrolling over the ClusterMap automatic titles are generated and assigned to every cluster. By clicking on the cluster, the results and respective information can be viewed.
Agent
The Agent portlet allows individual users to create their own personalized information channels, either from Natural Language, legacy Keywords, Boolean expressions, Parametric Searches or even simply by example. These agents then monitor all incoming information and can target and alert useful content on a continual basis, automatically.
Users begin by customizing the Agent Portlet by setting up 'interest agents'. This is done by the user describing in plain natural language what it is they are interested in. The Interest Agent persistently identifies all relevant content and presents it in a concise personalized page, complete with URL links. As new information becomes available the agent will monitor new data submissions ensuring that the Portlet user is always provided with up-to-date information. Moreover, as user interests change users are also given the option to refine their interest by retraining the agents.
Breaking News
The Breaking News portlet identifies what's new in the information space. Taking the cluster analysis from a previous time period and comparing it to a current one allows automatic identification of new clusters that weren't previously present, allowing automation of 'breaking news' pages, alerting to new areas of information or new interest trends in subscriber groups.
Community
The Community portlet notifies individual users of any agents that people in the work community may have set up using the Agent portlet, which resemble their own personalized agents. This Portlet brings together the benefits of collaboration, reducing duplicated effort as well as identifying experts within the organization.
Cluster
Cluster portlets provide a range of classification Portlets and visualization tools that can be added to the BEA environment, further enriching the portal experience.
Autonomy's automatic clustering features identify areas of intense research, breaking news or emerging trends and market opportunities based on information found within the knowledge base. Autonomy's Cluster Portlets can take large sets of document data or user-profile information and automatically identify the main set of concepts/ themes inherent within the knowledge base.
Furthermore, clustering can be used in identifying the 'gap' between the users interests and the data being provided to the users thereby allowing 'knowledge/ content gaps' to be eliminated through provision or aggregation of further content relevant to the community.
Expertise Locator
The Expertise Locator portlet allows users to find people who have been dealing with a specific subject by entering a brief natural language description of the subject. It returns all agents and profiles that match this description together with the names of the users who own the agents or profiles.
Hot News
The Hot News Cluster portlet can identify what is most popular or the main topics/clusters of information or interests found within the information assets or an organization. This allows the business to instantly receive a high-level view of the entire knowledge base providing a catalyst that enables informed decisions to be made faster.
Administration
The Administration portlet that enables you to administer and maintain all Autonomy Portlet settings from a central location.
Profile
The Profile portlet brings new documents to users attention based on each users individual interest and according to their profile. This Portlet creates a profile on each user based on the concepts of the documents that the user has been reading within the Autonomy Portlet suite (Agents, Retrieval, Clustering, Community and so on). Every time a user opens a new document within the Autonomy Portlet suite, the user's profile will be update based on the information read.
Retrieval
Autonomy's Retrieval portlet provides a fully-automated and precise means of retrieving information. It allows content to be searched in any language and any format, wherever it is stored, and presented with hyperlinks to similar information, automatically and in real-time. Unlike ordinary searches that look for keywords the Autonomy Retrieval Portlet allows you to enter a natural language query. The Retrieval Portlet submits the natural language query to one or more databases that have been set up, in order to find documents that are related to your query.
Similar People
The Similar People portlet notifies a user or other people in the same organization of other users who have been using the same type of documents that you have been looking at. This feature helps users avoid spending time on searching for information that may already be available.
Spectrograph
The Spectrograph portlet displays the relationship between clusters on successive periods and sets of data. Clusters are presented as a JSP-based spectrograph, whereby the x-axis represents information over time (enabling users to visualize how clusters develop over a given time period), whilst the y-axis represents the range of concepts defined within the knowledge base.
Moreover, the spectrograph is able to display hot and breaking news in the same instance. The importance of clusters over time can be seen through the change of color and width. The color/ intensity of the lines is an indication of the size of cluster. The brighter colors indicate what is popular, and the width of the lines is an indication of the quality of the cluster. Navigation features are identical to the 2D ClusterMap enabling users to browse clusters with a click of the mouse.
After installing the Autonomy portlets, you can use customize them or add them to your portal without customizing them. For more information about working with portlets, see the WebLogic Portal Portlet Development Guide.
To add these portlets:
Note:
These instructions assume you have already deployed your portal application.
Locate the AutonomyPortlets.zip file in your WebLogic Portal installation directory. For example, //WebLogic_HOME/portal/third-party/autonomy-wlp92/common/AutonomyPortlets.zip
Extract the contents of the AutonomyPortlets.zip file to a temporary directory of your choosing. For example, c:/temp/.
The following files are extracted:
autonomyPiB.jar
Portlets folder
AutonomyPortletSettings.usr
portlets.cfg
portalInabox.css
WEB-INF/classes/*.properties
Copy the autonomyPiB.jar file to yourEAR/EARContent/APP-INF/lib directory.
Copy the portlet folder to your webApp/webContent directory. For example, //user_projects/w4WP_workspaces/project_name/yourWebApp/WebContent/
Copy the portalInabox.css file to the yourWebApp/webContent/portlets directory that you added in step 5.
Copy the AutonomyPortletSettings.usr file to your Datasync project directory. For example, //<yourDataSyncProject>/src/userprofiles/.
Copy the *.properties files in the temporary WEB-INF/classes directory to your web application’s WEB-INF/classes/ directory. If you don’t have this directory, create it. For example,
<yourWebapp>/WebContent/WEB-INF/classes
If running in a cluster, move the file portlets.cfg file to a shared filesystem.
Using a text editor, modify the default-value setting in AutonomyPortletSettings.usr to point to the portlets.cfg file.
When finished editing, save your changes.
Using a text editor, edit the portlets.cfg file and update the following values to point to your IDOL Server port, if changed: UAPort, ClassPort, and DREPort. Edit other settings if needed.
When finished editing, save changes.
When finished adding the portlets, the available portlets should display in Workshop for WebLogic.
Writing Autonomy-based Applications and Portlets
You can create Autonomy-based applications and portlets using the Autonomy APIs. The Autonomy API is included in the wlp-services-app-lib shared library within Workshop for WebLogic.
For Autonomy API documentation, review the Autonomy Javadoc.
Note:
Do not execute queries against any IDOL database which is prefixed with WLP_CM_REPO as these indexes contain information on the BEA content repositories in use for your portal. If you want to execute queries against BEA’s content management repositories, you need to use the WebLogic Portal API, see the WebLogic Portal JavaDoc.
Creating Search Portlets for BEA Content Repositories
You can also create portlets that can be used to search WebLogic Portal’s content management system. To do this, you use the WebLogic Portal Content Search API. You must also install and configure the BEACMRepoFetch in enable this search capability. WebLogic Portal ships with this custom fetch, see Setting up BEA Content Management Search.
Although you use Autonomy’s APIs to create most search portlets, you must use WebLogic Portal Content Search API to create portlets that will search the WebLogic Portal content management system. See the WebLogic Portal JavaDoc for more details.
