TMCore EPiServer Module
Findability Tools
To us, Findability is the measure of a good web site. Findability is the feeling that you are not lost in a morass of information, that you have the power to search, browse and most importantly find what you are looking for. Finability is most crucially a function of good Information Architecture, but it is also helped by having a solid formal ontology and advanced tools that can make use of that ontology - these are what the TMCore EPiServer Module provide.
The TMCore EPiServer Module provides a number of user-configurable web parts,which may be used in a non-web part environment as standard ASP.NET controls, enabling the results of queries against the TMCore Information Server to be displayed on portal pages. These queries can make use of contextual information such as the current item being viewed, the current site or the current user, making it easy to create sophisticated sets of personalised and contextual links.
Semantic Link Web Parts
The simplest of the navigation web parts are the one-hop and two-hop web parts. These web parts start from a specific topic or contextual item (the current page, the current list, the current site, or the current user) and follow one or two specific semantic links. These web parts are ideal for displaying "related content" links that never go stale and never need manual editing.
These web parts generate XML output that is rendered using developer-defined XSLT and CSS for complete flexibility in presentation.
Faceted Search
The Faceted Search web parts allow users to find content by drilling down through one or more dimensions of the classification of the content items. For example they could search for users by location and skills. Each of the dimensions that content items are classified on is called a facet. The faceted search infrastructure supports both flat list and hierarchical facets.
For users, Faceted Search provides an interactive way of finding content, as they make broader and narrower selections in the facets, the search results list changes, getting smaller and more focussed as selections are narrowed down and longer and broader as selections are made more general.
As with the other web parts, XSLT and CSS are used to provide developers with control over the way that faceted search is presented.
Topic Clouds
The Topic Cloud web parts allow tag clouds to be created from topics and styled according to the site designers wishes. Tag clouds are popular navigation tools, allowing the user to see a metric of (usually) importance or frequency of a particular tag or topic.
Topic clouds may be generated in terms of the entire data model (for example: show me the instances of Person and make each name bigger or smaller depending on the number of Article instances they are associated with as the author.
As with the other web parts, XSLT and CSS are used to provide developers with control over the way that faceted search is presented.