Understanding Document Attributes and Properties

Now, apart from Bill's requirements, Timothy thinks about other users in general too. He understands what document attributes are.

Each source has its own set of document attributes. Document attributes describe the properties of a document, like metadata.

The users of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search use document attributes for many things. They use it for document management, access control, and also for version control. The users use different sources with different attribute names, but for the same idea. For example, Antonio uses the attribute name as "version," whereas Tony uses the name as "revision." They can also use the attribute name "language" in one source, and "programming language" in another source.

Oracle SES has several default search attributes. They can be incorporated in search applications for a more detailed search and richer presentation.

Timothy is expected to design the crawler plug-in in such a way that during crawling, the plug-in has to map the document attribute to a search attribute with the same name and data type. If the attribute is not found, then the crawler has to create a new search attribute with the same name and type as the document attribute defined in the crawler plug-in.

Timothy should also decide which document attributes need to be extracted and saved. He can also create the plug-in such that the list of collected attributes are configurable. Oracle SES automatically registers attributes returned by the plug-in. The plug-in can decide which attributes to return for a document.