Using the Topic Assistant

The Topic Assistant provides a way for you to easily organize items in the portal into areas based on the areas used by existing items. This reduces the time and effort it takes to manage areas, allowing items in the portal to appear in search results and the portal site map according to the areas to which they belong.

To use the Topic Assistant to organize items into areas, you must train it to recognize areas for items based on a training set of items that you select. That set of items is then used as a sample to suggest areas for other items in the portal. New items created after training are automatically suggested for areas based on this training set.

To get a good working training set of items for the Topic Assistant, complete the following steps:

In the portal site map, create areas based on the needs of your organization. Some areas are already created for you, but generally, every organization must add additional areas to reflect the content used in that organization.
Add and organize items into areas in the portal site map until you have a variety of areas and a good idea as to what areas are most common. The items in each area should cover as many aspects of the area as possible. Also, individual items can and should be added to multiple areas.
On the Search tab of the properties page for areas, include areas in the training set until you have an adequate training set. The minimum training set includes two areas with at least ten documents each, but the Topic Assistant becomes more accurate as you add more areas to your training set. It is important that the areas in the training set represent the most common areas with most frequently used and highest number of documents.
Train the Topic Assistant on the Use Topic Assistant page.

Areas are suggested by the Topic Assistant the next time the content index is crawled. The examples in your training set are used to organize other items into areas based on the words and properties of those examples.

The more similar the words and properties of other items are to those in certain areas of the training set, the more likely those items are to be placed in the same area by the Topic Assistant. A single item is often added to more than one area.

The items organized by the Topic Assistant are displayed in the areas selected by the Topic Assistant, but must first be approved by an area manager before they can be used in searches and targeted content. This enables you to avoid the automatic approval of items that do not belong in the area suggested by the Topic Assistant.

Add areas to the training set of the Topic Assistant

Before you can use the Topic Assistant, you must include areas in the training set that is used by the Topic Assistant to add documents to areas when crawling the content index.

Click Site Settings, and in the Portal Site Content section, click Manage portal site structure.
On the Portal Site Map page, click a area that you want to use when training the Topic Assistant, and then, on the drop-down menu that appears, click Edit.
On the Change Settings page, click the Search tab.
On the Search properties page, in the Topic Assistant section, select Yes for Include when using the Topic Assistant.
Click OK.
Repeat for as many areas as you want to include in the training set.
Note Areas in the training set must have at least ten documents, and you must include at least two areas in the training set. The more areas you include, the more accurate the Topic Assistant is when organizing other items in the portal into areas.

Enable and train the Topic Assistant

Click Site Settings, and in the Portal Site Content section, click Use Topic Assistant.
On the Use Topic Assistant page, in the Enable Topic Assistant section, select Enable Topic Assistant. The other controls on the page are now available.
In the Precision section, select the precision of the Topic Assistant. Higher precision results in fewer documents organized into areas. Lower precision results in more documents with less accuracy.
In the Training Status section, the most recent training time and the current status of the Topic Assistant are listed. To train the Topic Assistant, click Train Now.
Note Items are not automatically categorized until the next time you crawl the content index.
Click OK.

Using the Topic Assistant

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