Glossary
Here's a quick guide to some terms that you find in the Sagace documentation.
- Facet
- Snippet
- Rich Snippet
In Sagace, a facet defines a particular aspect to characterize and classify databases.
A collection of objects (e.g., databases) can be classified by using a combination of multiple attributes. Such a classification system is called faceted classification, and a search method that utilizes a faceted classification system is called faceted search or faceted navigation. In recent years, many search engines have adopted faceted search interfaces. In contrast, enumerative classification is an approach in which all the objects are classified in a single system, mostly structured in a hierarchical manner.
A Snippet means a fragment of information. In the context of search results, it indicates a summary description for each search result.
In Sagace, shown as the snippet is an excerpt of data that matches the query words. It helps users judge the relevance of the search result.
Rich snippets represent informative metadata (data about data) for search results.
A search result usually contains a title, a URL and a snippet (a summary description). However, pages from biological databases often provide only short (or no) natural language descriptions for the data, making it difficult to judge whether the retrieved data are relevant or not. Therefore, Sagace adds metadata to each search result and calls it a rich snippet, following Google Rich Snippets. (Certain metadata are retrieved only if they are provided in a specific format.)