Getting started with demo data

This section refers to using the preloaded demo that can be downloaded at www.siren.io/downloads.

This demo includes the following preloaded tables (technically indexes in the included Elasticsearch clusters):

company

A collection of companies

article

A collection of articles about companies

investment

A collection of investments in companies

investor

A collection of investors

.siren

Siren Investigate configuration

The demonstration data set was built from a sample of articles, which were gathered from tech blogs and from data about companies, investments and investors in the CrunchBase 2013 Snapshot, which is copyright © 2013 CrunchBase Inc.

Starting Siren Investigate

Start the backend (Elasticsearch) by running elasticsearch\bin\elasticsearch on Linux/OS X or double clicking on elasticsearch\bin\elasticsearch.bat on Windows.
Go to the siren-investigate directory and run bin/siren on Linux/macOS or double-click bin\siren.bat on Windows.

You should have two command line windows open and after a while (it will take several minutes the first time you run) you can navigate to http://localhost:5606 and access Siren Investigate.

Username and passwords at login

You can access the demonstration as three different users:

sirenadmin has read access to all data indices and can modify the Siren Investigate configuration.
sirenuser has read access to all data indices but cannot modify the Siren Investigate configuration.
sirennoinvestor has read access to all data indices except investor. The user has no access to the Investors dashboard.

The password for all users is password.

Accessing the dashboards

The left sidebar is used to navigate between apps in Siren Investigate and can be expanded or contracted using the (expand/contract) button at the bottom of the sidebar.

By default, Siren Investigate displays the Articles dashboard. Dashboards can be configured to display multiple visualizations on the documents stored in a specific index or returned by a saved search on an index pattern.

Each dashboard is represented by a tab containing the dashboard title and the number of documents available for visualizations.

articles dashboard

You can quickly search specific articles through the search input in the navigation bar. For example, let’s find all the articles written about wireless or Wi-Fi:

We can immediately see that there are 11595 articles about those topics and all the visualizations are refreshed to aggregate data for this subset of articles.

In addition to simple text, queries in the search bar can be written using the Lucene query syntax, or Elasticsearch Query DSL.

Filtering results

Visualizations can be used to create filters. For example, you can see all the articles about wireless or Wi-Fi published by TechCrunch by clicking the TechCrunch slice inside the Articles by Source pie chart visualization.

Pie slice

Dashboard with filter on the slice applied

To switch off a filter, move the mouse pointer over it and click the check box icon. To switch off all the filters applied to the dashboard, click Actions then Disable.

Creating filters with the Relational Navigator

The Relational Navigator visualization enables you to create cross-dashboard filters. For example, from Companies in the dashboard, you can see that there are 470 companies mentioned in TechCrunch articles about _wireless or Wi-Fi.

Relational filter from articles to companies

The relational filter created by clicking the button is displayed in the filter bar, and can be switched off or removed, just like any other filter. Moving the mouse pointer over the filter will display the list of joined indices and their filters:

Relational filter in the filter bar

Relational filters can be accumulated. For example, if you click Investment rounds →, you will see data about the 351 investment rounds related to a subset of 470 companies mentioned in the TechCrunch articles about wireless or Wi-Fi. For more information, see Relational Navigator.

Enhanced search results

The Record Table visualization displays the current set of results documents as a table. For example, Companies Table is configured to display the following fields:

Time (foundation date)
label (the company name)
description
category_code*** Enhanced search results
- Query Based Aggregations
- Datasource Entity Selection
founded_year
countrycode

Companies Table

Select Edit, then click Edit () to choose which fields to display and customize the order of the columns. If the index is time based, the Time column will always be displayed.

Click the right arrow to expand the first row, then scroll down to the homepage_url field and click the Toggle column icon:

Column positioning.

You can click the arrows to move the column to the desired position:

Column positioning.

Click handlers

You can define click handlers on cells to perform several actions. Let’s add a click handler to open the company homepage when cliCreating . Go into edit mode.

Scroll through the view options and click Add click handler.
From the Column box, select homepage_url.
From the On click I want to box, select Follow the URL.
Select homepage_url as the URL field, then click Apply Changes ().

You can test the click handler immediately by clicking a cell displaying a homepage URL in the preview displayed on the right:

URL click handler.

Saving the visualization

Click Save in the top right to save the visualization, then click Dashboard to go back to the Companies dashboard. For addiCreatingadoc#_record_table_visualization[Record Table visualization.]]

For more information about visualization, see Record Table visualization.