Symphony of Search, 4: Searching FOR data

Welcome back to my bi-weekly newsletter after a summer-break!

Today, I briefly dive into the first out of a series of underlying principles of how search is performed in Two Ravens. Going forward, my newsletter will change between search examples and the underlying principles at play.

Principle #1: Searching for data is different than searching in data.

In Two Ravens, searching for data is the first part of a process - it takes place before searching in data. A couple of examples:

1) Two Ravens has a Contract Management System (CMS). The CMS has been crawled by the data catalog. When e.g. lawyers search the data catalog and find a specific contract, they search for data. They then CMS via the data catalog, download the specific contract, open it and then search in it to find the paragraphs and phrases they are looking for - that's searching in data.

2) Data scientists in Two Ravens can search the data catalog also, to find data sources to further explore and build solutions on. When they search the data catalog, they search for data. Further into the process, they begin searching in data, in the data sources.

Searching for data requires a language - an Information Retrieval Query Language (IRQL). IRQL is not a programming language, but the way it searches for data resembles just that. The difference is: IRQL works at the metadata level, searching for data, programming languages work at the data level, searching in data.

Next time, you'll see search examples of IRQL in Two Ravens. Stay tuned!