Analyzing Your Data

This section of the Application Builder tutorial describes how to add a second entity into an application.

About this task

In this task, you will take an additional set of indexed data and explore it to see if any of the content can be associated with the content that exist within your first entity definition.

Note: Like the example-metadata search collection, you will have another search collection, which is preinstalled in your Watson Explorer instance, providing you are completing this tutorial in the self-contained, standalone mode, which means you have local instances of Watson Explorer Engine and Application Builder running on the same server. If your Watson Explorer Engine or Application Builder instances are located externally, you will need to modify the appropriate URLs for those search collection stores as they are defined in the Application Builder Entity Model. Otherwise, this tutorial assumes you are running local instances of both Watson Explorer Engine and Application Builder.

To get started in analyzing the data that this new additional search collection contains, you will crawl and then conduct a query in your Watson Explorer Engine instance on the example-appbuilder search collection. The idea is to gain a simple overview of the sort of information that this search collection generates about your users, which can therefore enable you to conceptualize how the new information might associate with other existing content you previously defined in Application Builder with the example-metadata collection store. To crawl the collection and conduct a simple query, do the following:

Procedure

Navigate to the example-appbuilder search collection overview tab in the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool for the Watson Explorer Engine instance that you are using. The search collection seed configuration page for example-appbuilder displays. Click start to crawl the sample collection.
Test example-appbuilder collection with query-meta. From the navigation menu on the left side of the administration tool, click the Search button, leaving the search field blank. Watson Explorer Engine tests the search collection with the default query-meta search application, which is provided with Watson Explorer Engine. A results page displays the search results for the example-appbuilder search collection.
Examine example-appbuilder search results. After testing the example-appbuilder search collection, the search results page displays.
The results page for this search collection displays a URL to the unique entity instance for that search collection and displays the fields that are associated with that search result. Specifically, each search result on the search results page provides the following information for each search page in this search collection:
- Name
- Word Count
- Type
- Publisher
- Assignment
- Login
Notice that some of the results have a Type of user, and some have the type of Author. It looks like your collection might have multiple sets of useable data in it.

Results

Each result provides metadata about these fields that is used by the entities and associations in this tutorial.

Note: Application Builder is typically configured to require authentication by its users. This will be discussed in a future module of this tutorial. The modules in this tutorial do not discuss authentication.

You analyzed the data you have in the example-appbuilder collection, which is a file containing fields of data about literary agents which could provide content for your application. Now you are ready to take this insight and use it to help expand your application.