The Guided Search Information Transformation Layer (ITL) reads in your source data and manipulates it into a set of indices for the MDEX Engine. The Guided Search ITL consists of the Content Acquisition System and the Data Foundry.
Although the original source data is not changed, this transformation process may change its representation within your Guided Search implementation. The Guided Search ITL is an off-line process that you run on your data at intervals that are appropriate for your business requirements.
The Oracle Commerce Content Acquisition System includes the Web Crawler and the CAS server, as well as a rich set of packaged adapters.
These components crawl unstructured content sources and ingest structured data. This includes relational databases, file servers, content management systems, and enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and master data management (MDM).
Packaged adapters reach the most common systems, including JDBC and ODBC. The Content Adapter Development Kit (CADK) allows developers to write custom adapters and Java manipulators.
The Guided Search Data Foundry aggregates information and transforms it into Guided Search records and MDEX Engine indices.
During the data processing phase, the Data Foundry:
Tags it with the dimension values used for navigating and Guided Search properties used for display.
Stores the tagged data—along with your dimension specifications and any configuration rules—as Guided Search records that are ready for indexing.
Indexes the Guided Search records it produced during its data processing phase, and produces a set of indices in MDEX Engine format.
