Customizing Categories in ISYS

Enterprise search technologies that are restricted to the basic 'query/response' approach can no longer keep up with the rigorous demands of today's businesses and government organizations. To ensure our users derive maximum benefit from search, ISYS goes beyond standard search with our proprietary On-The-Fly Categorization, which enables users to drill down and refine a results set to help them pinpoint the right information instantly.

One of the great benefits of our categorization is ISYS automatically generates the classification scheme for you and displays it at query time. But as a general rule, ISYS has always been designed as a flexible enterprise search solution. As such, we give you the power to augment our auto-generated categories through a simple set of windows that enable you to create user-defined categories.

To enable the creation of categories, open up ISYS:utilities and then open your index. Then click on the tools menu and select Index Options. Next, check the box under the “Categories” heading labeled “Create categories for documents indexed.” Finally, click OK to close the Index Options window.

Once categories are enabled, you can have ISYS automatically create categories by running a “Recategorize” from the “Actions” menu.

The automatic categories will be based on the path and file names of the documents in the index. You can customize these categories by going to the “Tools” menu and selecting “Edit Categories.” This will bring up a new “ISYS Category Editor” window.

You can edit the automatic categories, or create your own categories in this window. Categories can be based on the path and file name or metadata of your documents. You can also have the category name set to the value of a particular metadata field, such as Author or Subject.

To create a new category, click on the drop-down arrow of the Add button. You can then select which type of category you want to create.

For this example, I decided to create a category named “Levi’s Documents.” For a document to belong to this category, I want the word “Levi” to appear in the “Author” field of the document’s metadata.

When I click OK, my new category will show up in the “ISYS Category Editor” window as a “User Defined” category.

You need not update or reindex your index for changes to the categories; you only need to run a “Recategorize” again for your category changes to take effect.

Once you’ve run a “Recategorize,” you can use the categories to help you find documents in ISYS:query. The categories will be displayed on the right side of the result list. You can double-click on a category to show only the results that belong to the category.

In the example below, I ran a search for “support” and the double-clicked on the “Levi’s Documents” category to show only the two results that belong to the category.

For more information on customizing categories, see the online help in the ISYS:utilities program under the “Help” menu.

Don’t forget, if you have any questions regarding Tech Tips you can email:
support@isys-search.com.