Dimensions are logical categories that make it possible to organize your Endeca records into structures that customers can navigate through to find information about products or services that they might want to purchase.
A dimension is a hierarchy of dimension values. A dimension as a whole typically corresponds to a general category of products or services. Dimension values contain increasingly specific information about products and services, the lower they are in the hierarchy.
The top-most dimension value in a dimension is known as the dimension root. A dimension root serves as the name of its dimension.
Each dimension value can have one or more child dimension values; a dimension value with child dimension values is known as a parent dimension value. A child dimension value can have only one parent dimension value. Dimension values that are children of the same parent dimension value are known as sibling dimension values. Sibling dimension values cannot be identical. However, dimension values that are not siblings can be identical, even within the same dimension.
The dimension values that have no children are known as leaf dimension values. Leaf dimension values typically contain information about particular products and services. For example, a non-leaf dimension value might represent a range of prices and the leaf dimension values -- its children -- might represent individual products whose prices fall within that range.
The following figure illustrates a simple dimension named "Wine Type":
Records can be organized into searchable hierarchies by tagging them with dimension values. Records are typically tagged with leaf dimension values, but can be tagged with non-leaf dimension values for special purposes.
Tagging a record with a dimension value does the following things:
It specifies the location of the record within the associated dimension. In the example below, the Endeca records for Bottles A and B are tagged with the Red dimension value in the Wine Type dimension, while the Endeca records for Bottles C and D are tagged with the White dimension value, and so on.
It identifies the record as a valid result when that dimension value is selected in a navigation query.
In the example below, a navigation query on the Red dimension value produces a result set that contains Bottles A and B.
You can think of a navigation query as "return all the records that are
organized under the
xxx dimension value in the
yyy dimension." Or, you can think of it as "return
all the records that have been tagged with the
xxx dimension value in the
yyy dimension." In either case, the result is the
same.
A record can be tagged with any number of dimension values from any number of dimensions. This enables users to navigate to records through any dimension or combination of dimensions that they choose. Using multiple dimensions is described in more detail in the "Multiple dimensions" topic.
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