TMCore SharePoint Module
Findability Tools
To us, Findability is the measure of a good portal. 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 SharePoint Module provide.
The TMCore SharePoint Module provides a number of user-configurable web parts 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.
Generic Topic Map Query Web Parts
The Topic Map Content Query Web Part enables site developers to display the results of customised queries in a web part. The queries can be defined either as SQL queries that query the TMCore topic map database views, or using the browser-based query editor tool that provides a simple webform editor for creating ontology-based queries quickly and easily.
The results set from these queries can optionally include information both from the topic map and from SharePoint and the display is customisable using XSLT and CSS.
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.
Portal Search Integration
A customisable web part is provided that can be added to the standard SharePoint portal search results page and displays the results of the portal text search when executed against the knowledge model stored in the topic map. By including this web part on a portal search results page, users can effectively search both portal content and the portal knowledge model simultaneously.
The portal search integration can also be integrated with faceted search to enable users to slice and dice the search results set to narrow down a long results list into a shorter, more specific list of results.