Activity Snapshots Data Tracking Functions

Managing Content Tracker 8-25

8.4.2 Activity Snapshots

The activity snapshots feature captures user metadata that is relevant for each recorded content item access. This section covers the following topics: ■ Search Relevance Metrics on page 8-25 ■ Search Relevance Metadata Fields on page 8-26

8.4.2.1 Search Relevance Metrics

When activated, the activity metrics and corresponding metadata fields provide search relevance information about user accesses of content items. An optional automatic load function allows you to update the last access activity metric to ensure that checked-in content items are appropriately timestamped. Content Tracker fills the search relevance custom metadata fields with content item usage information that indicates the popularity of particular content items. This information includes the date of the most recent access and the number of accesses in two distinct time intervals. Users can apply the information generated from these activity metrics functions in various ways. You can selectively use the activity metrics to subsequently order search results based on content item popularity. For example, you might want to order search results according to which content items have been recently viewed or the most viewed in the last week. If the snapshot function is activated, the values in the search relevance metadata fields are updated during a post-reduction step. During this processing step, Content Tracker uses SQL queries to determine which content items have changed activity metrics values. Content Tracker updates the applicable database tables with the new values and initiates a re-indexing cycle. However, only the content items that have changed metadata values are re-indexed. See Data Reduction Process with Activity Metrics on page 8-9. The Snapshot tab enables you to activate the snapshot function and selectively enable each of the activity metrics. Each function that you activate must have a custom metadata field associated with it. For more information, see Enabling the Snapshot Function and the Activity Metrics Options on page 8-47 and Linking Activity Metrics Functions to Search Relevance Metadata Fields on page 8-47. Alternatively, you can manually update the applicable configuration variables in Content Trackers sct.cfg file. See Configuration and Customization on page 8-84. Note: By default, Content Tracker collects and records only content access event data. This excludes information gathering on non-content access events like searches as well as the collection and synthesis of user profile summaries. As a result, only the SctAccessLog table is populated. Although the user data output tables exist, Content Tracker does not populate them unless the Snapshot function is activated. See Performance Optimization Functions on page 8-1 for more information. 8-26 Application Administrators Guide for Content Server

8.4.2.2 Search Relevance Metadata Fields

Before you can link the activity metrics functions to custom metadata fields, the fields must already exist and must be of the correct type. The metadata field associated with the Last Access metric must be of type Date. The metadata fields associated with the Access Count metrics must be of type Integer. See Creating the Search Relevance Metadata Fields on page 8-45. When you create custom metadata fields to use in conjunction with the activity metrics, you have the option to enable them for the search index. If the custom metadata fields are indexed and searchable, the access values stored in them are more efficiently accessed. That is, indexed fields are more useful for selecting andor ordering search results by relevance. Indexing is expensive, particularly when full text search is enabled. The disadvantage of indexed metadata fields is that when the values in the search relevance metadata fields change, the affected content items must be re-indexed to update their values in the database table. Therefore, on a large instance with many content item accesses, updating the search relevance fields will adversely affect performance. Alternatively, you can disable the indexing function of the custom metadata fields. In this case, it is possible to search on and find values for non-indexed metadata fields, but the search is more expensive. If re-indexing the affected content items degrades the performance too severely, you can optionally deactivate the Snapshot function. Unfortunately, this means that the activity metrics information will no longer be collected. As a result, you will be unable to order current search results by usage for example, listing accessed content items in order of decreasing popularity.

8.4.3 Service Calls