Working with external taxonomies

Endeca offers functionality that allows you to work with external taxonomies, or logical data hierarchies. This capability allows you to build all or part of a logical hierarchy for your data set outside of Developer Studio and then transform that logical hierarchy into Endeca dimensions and dimension values for use in search and Guided Navigation.

This topic introduces the external taxonomy features and provides cross-references to the Endeca Forge Guide, where you can find complete implementation details.

Externally managed

An externally managed taxonomy is a logical hierarchy for a data set that is built and managed using a third-party tool. You can use the Discover and Load buttons in the Dimensions view to include an externally managed taxonomy in your project. At that point, the taxonomy becomes a dimension. However, it is a read-only dimension whose hierarchy is managed by the third-party tool that created it.

In Developer Studio, you can view this type of dimension and delete dimension values from it. You cannot, however, add dimension values to it. If you want to modify an externally managed dimension or add dimension values, you have to edit the taxonomy using the third-party tool and then update the taxonomy in your project.

See "Working with an Externally Managed Dimension" in the Endeca Forge Guide for implementation details.

Externally created

An externally created dimension also describes a logical hierarchy for a data set; however, the dimensions are built outside of Developer Studio in an .xml file. The logical hierarchy of the dimension conforms to Endeca's external interface for describing a data hierarchy-external_dimensions.dtd. Once you import an externally created dimension, its ownership is wholly transferred to Developer Studio. As such, you can modify the dimension in any way necessary in Developer Studio, but you can no longer edit it in the .xml file itself (unless you re-import it).

See "Working with an Externally Created Dimension" in the Endeca Forge Guide for implementation details.

The difference between externally managed and externally created taxonomies

It is important to clarify the difference between an externally managed taxonomy and an externally created dimension. An externally managed taxonomy is created using a third-party tool, managed by a third party tool, and transformed by Forge via .xslt into a read-only Endeca dimension. By comparison, externally created dimensions are manually created in an .xml file, imported via Developer Studio without an .xslt transformation, and are fully editable in Developer Studio.

Using Stratify taxonomies

Integrating a Stratify taxonomy and Stratify document classification capabilities into your pipeline is a special case of working with external taxonomies that allows you to classify unstructured source documents. For more information, see "Classifying Documents with Stratify" in the Endeca Forge Guide.