Overview

The following topics are contained in this overview:

• Introduction - A short introduction to Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server.

• Features - Descriptions of the key features for Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server.

• Getting Started - Steps to quickly get you up and running.

iPlanet Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server is a seamless upgrade to iPlanet Compass Server. It provides a set of wizards to get your system up and running quickly, a sophisticated content-based document classifier and a greatly enhanced My Compass system designed to encourage feedback and information sharing. Features of My Compass include filtering by significance, a feedback and discussion capability and a greatly improved interface for finding and viewing information in your personal news page.

Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server is built on open Internet standards like Java, HTML, LDAP and Javascript and like Compass Server, offers a highly customizable interface.

Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server adds My Compass feedback and discussion capabilities to the Compass Server to create a complete information system. In this system, users can :

• Monitor information without overload. Personalized Knowledge Services users have control on the timing and content of their My Compass newsletters. Tools like the Interest Profile Editor and the "Update Now" feature allow users to experiment with and refine their Interest Profile to create highly refined filters.

• Add their feedback on documents that they find in receive and have these escalated to others who need to know. Conversly, this means they are able to see what their colleagues are saying about certain topics.

To achieve this, it provides the following end-user features :

• Ability to define subscription levels for each subscription - In addition to subscribing to a particular category or query, the Interest Profile Editor allows users to specify for each topic, how significant a document must be before they receive it in their newsletters.

• Subscription deactivation - the ability to activate and deactivate subscriptions, when combined with the Instant News feature enables users to fine tune and tweak their Interest Profile.

• Subscription templates help users get started using My Compass quickly and effectively.

• Adding feedback to documents - the rating panel allows users to enter feedback on the current document. Feedback items are stored and indexed in the Compass database so you can retrieve them via searching and also receive them in your My Compass newsletters.

• Multiple views of documents via the personal news page offers a personal news page system allowing users to view the documents they receive from My Compass by subscription, author, and source.

• An Update Now feature allows users to receive an instant newsletter update. Users are able to specify how recent the information in this newsletter needs to be and how they would like the update to be delivered.

• Enhanced search user interface - Personalized Knowledge Services supplies an extended list of end-user search templates. These templates, when selected, can:

  • sort documents in the search or browse results list in order of its rating

  • display the rating of each document

  • allow users to rate or add their feedback on documents by clicking on the document's rating symbol

  • display a symbol for each document indicating if there are feedback items to be reviewed. Clicking on this symbol displays the document and all its associated feedback.

For the administrator, Personalized Knowledge Services extends and simplifies the Compass Server administration by supplying:

• Updated Quick Start Tasks page - This page provides links to the Site and Categories Wizards and Autoclassify agent. To access this page, select Compass Server | Server Preferences | Quick Start Tasks.

• A Site Wizard that allows you to select sites from a pre-defined list of popular WWW news-related sites. Simply start the Site Wizard from the Compass Server | Server Preferences | Quick Start Tasks page. Under the Expand Robot Scope area, click the "Select from a list of Predefined Sites" link to start the wizard. You can also access the Site Wizard by clicking on Compass Server | Robot | Select Sites.

• A Categories Wizard that allows you to select categories from a pre-defined list of popular categories. Simply start the Categories Wizard from the Compass Server | Server Preferences | Quick Start Tasks page. Under the Enable Category Browsing area, click the "Select from a list of Predefined Categories" link to start the wizard.

• Enhanced autoclassification

  While the Compass Server does provide autoclassification capabilities and the ability to define classification rules for resources that are enumerated by the Compass Server robot, these are limited to matches against the metadata. The Autoclassify agent complements this and takes it one step further by allowing the full breadth of full text matching conditions to be defined as Autoclassify rules. These rules may be any valid search query and includes searching on both meta-data as well as the text of the documents. For instance, you could define an Autoclassify rule that reads, "if the document contains "Solaris or Sun Microsystems", then classify the document under the category "Companies:Hardware Companies:Silicon Valley:Sun Microsystems". The Autoclassify agent also tracks changes in the category hierarchy and automatically updates classification terms in the Compass database. This keeps the classification "current" and again is designed to make searching for information via the browse interface much more effective.

  An Category Construction Editor enables the categories administrator to define Autoclassify rules for each category in the category hierarchy. Typically, you should only need to define rules for "leaf" nodes or categories in the hierarchy. Whenever the profiler is run, it first activates Autoclassify to ensure document classifications are up to date before it does its job of filtering and delivering newsletters to users.

  For a complete description of the Autoclassify operation and how it differs from the Compass Server robot classification system, refer to About Autoclassify.

• Ad-hoc executive reports - Company librarians can satisfy ad-hoc end-user requests to generate a My Compass newsletter based on a set of subjects and a search date range. End-user requests like "send me a document summarizing what's in the Compass database about the Smith - ABC merger over the last 2 weeks" can be produced within minutes. The Compass Server | My Compass | Users | Edit Registration capability has been extended to enable the administrator to edit the user's Interest Profile and activate the Profiler specifically for that user.

• My Compass User administration
  
  
  The ability to define subscription templates means that firstly, you are able to ensure users are monitoring specific, important, subject areas and secondly, to assist users in getting started with an initial Interest Profile they can then edit and refie.
  
  A batch-edit capability has been introduced to simplify the task of modifying multiple My Compass registrations (specifically, enabling/disabling the Interest Profile and setting email delivery options). From the Compass Server | My Compass | Users link, select the users from the list of results from your Find operation, choose Action = Edit and then Submit.

• Profiler scheduling - you can schedule the profiler to run up to 24 times a day thus ensuring users are getting alerted to any new information or useful feedback sooner.

• Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server supports any LDAP-compatible directory server, enabling user interest profiles to be stored in your standard organizational directory without having to duplicate user accounts in a Compass Server specific directory.

• Supports European language specific numerals in subscription names and custom topics making it possible to enter search subscriptions that contain characters like ü in searches (for example, "darüber" or "universität").

Briefly, these are the steps to get up and running with Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server:

1. Installing Personalized Knowledge Services for Compass Server

Complete installation instructions are included in the readme file that comes with your installation. Here is a brief summary for those familiar with installing iPlanet servers:

1. Identify where you have installed the iPlanet Compass Server.
2. Run the installation program and answer its questions.

2. Using the Site Wizard

The Site Wizard consists of a list of predefined site filters related to some of the most popular news sources on the Internet and a point-and-click interface which makes it easy for your to select those you wish to add to your list of robot sites. If you would like to your users to monitor these news sources, using this Wizard is a quick and convenient way of getting your robot set up.

See Using the Site Wizard for details on using this Wizard.

3. Using the Category Wizard

The Category Wizard supplies a set of predefined category hierarchies (complete with Autoclassify rules), designed to help you set up your initial category tree and start classifying documents. You can use it either to build a category tree from scratch or to add categories to your existing tree.

See Using the Category Wizard for details on using this Wizard.

4. Setting up Autoclassify

The Autoclassifier uses classification rules that you define for categories that are in the category hierarchy. Personalized Knowledge Services uses the term "Autoclassify rules" to describe these classification rules. The Autoclassifier matches these rules against a document's content and tags the document with the corresponding category if it finds a match.

Note: Before configuring Autoclassify rules, be sure to read About Autoclassify.

See Managing Autoclassify for details on setting this up.

5. Creating Subscription Templates

Subscription templates are useful for two reasons :-

• they help your users get started using My Compass quickly and effectively
• they enable you to assign ownership of monitoring certain topic areas eg "East Coast Customers" to certain users

See Creating and Modifying Subscription Templates for details on setting this up.