Creating a Search Collection

The first step in creating a big data optimization solution for your organization is to define the data you want to search in a search collection.

A Watson™ Explorer Engine Big Data Application enables you to search any local or network location such as SMB shares, websites, databases, mail servers, local filesystems, or any custom location that is defined by you, the application developer. Any location that your application uses as a starting point for indexing local or remote data is known as a Seed.

It would be inefficient for the search engine to look at each seed every time a user submitted a search query. Therefore, the search engine creates an index of the data that is retrieved when crawling a seed. This index and related data makes up a Watson Explorer Engine Search Collection. These search collections are created when a seed is first crawled, and are subsequently updated based on a schedule defined by the Big Data application developer. Whena search collection is first created, a Watson Explorer Engine component known as a Source is also created, which is designed to make it easy to query that search collection.