Search capabilities for custom applications
BMC Helix Innovation Studio provides the following search capabilities in your application:
- Full-text search (FTS)—an index-driven search. When a user performs a search, only the index is searched instead of the entire text.
- Global search—An application-level search that enables the user to perform search operations within an application.
- Cognitive search—An AI-driven search that enables search by using natural language query, understands user's query, analyses data, and handles data enrichment requests for data change events.
Full-text search
Full-text search is a keyword-based search and involves indexing before searching so that when a user performs a search, only the index is searched instead of the entire text. FTS can identify stem words and can return the results accordingly. For example, when you search for fire, the search results will include words such as firewall, backfire, firefighter, firecracker, and so on. FTS can weigh words according to their relevancy depending on where they appear—in a title, a keyword, or the text that is being searched. Results that match the title can be weighted as more relevant and can be displayed among the top search results. For FTS to search across certain fields, the fields must be FTS enabled.
Global search
Global search is an application-level search that searches across multiple forms for records that match a word or phrase that a user types in the search area. Global search uses FTS and searches all fields that are FTS enabled in an application.
Cognitive search capabilities
Cognitive search is an AI-driven search capability that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to merge the scattered knowledge and provide more relevant search results. You can leverage a cognitive search service in BMC Helix Virtual Agent and custom applications to enable cognitive search across BMC Helix Innovation Studio data and external data.
Comparison between search capabilities
The following table provides the broad differences between FTS, global search, and cognitive search:
Full-text search | Global search | Cognitive search |
|---|---|---|
Full-text search is a keyword-based search. | Global search is an application-level search that uses FTS to search for keywords. Global search searches across multiple record definitions. | Cognitive search is a natural language search that provides enhanced results based on keyword extractions, sentiment analysis, relations, and so on. |
You must enable fields for FTS so that the data in those fields is searchable during FTS. | You must enable global search for searching terms in an application. | You must create collections in the cognitive search provider. Along with enabling the fields for cognitive search, cognitive search also requires search data sets that include searchable fields and record definitions. |
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