Relational browsing

Siren Investigate enables you to filter documents on a dashboard by showing only those that have a relation with documents displayed on a different dashboard, possibly stored in different indices.

Relational Navigator

The Relational Navigator component typically requires no configuration. It automatically discovers all possible destinations based on relationships between indices defined in the Data model app.

It can be reused across any dashboard (there is no need to create different ones for different dashboards).

Each dashboard has an associated entity table, which is based on an underlying index pattern. If the entity tables from two dashboards have a relational connection, this relationship is shown by the Relational Navigator, by default.

It is really much simpler than it sounds. Drop this component into a dashboard which is associated with an entity table or search and it will show you all the possible relational connections with other dashboards which have related entities.

The relational filter visualization requires Siren Federate.

Index to index relations

When two entities are directly connected

For example, let’s take the following indices:

article

an index containing articles; each document in the index has a field called companies which is an array that contains the ID of companies mentioned in the article. This index is displayed on the dashboard titled Articles.

company

an index containing information about companies; each document in the index has a field called id that contains the ID of the company. This index is displayed on the dashboard titled Companies.

Both indices are configured so that they are joined on the field companies of article with the field id of company. Then, it is possible to use that configuration to create a relational filter that would filter companies based on connected articles (or vice-versa).

In the Articles dashboard, the relational navigator visualization is displayed as a button which indicates the number of documents in the Companies dashboard that are mentioned in the articles of the current dashboard.

The following image shows the button for the relation described in the example; there are two possible destinations from 646,846 articles currently displayed

  • 18507 companies on All companies dashboard

  • 498 companies on Companies timeline analysis dashboard

Relational Navigator on the Articles dashboard

Clicking the first button will switch you to the Companies dashboard and display the 18507 companies; the relational filter is displayed in the filter bar:

Relational Navigator filter on the Companies dashboard

Index to entity Identifier relations

When two entities are connected using Entity Identifier

For example, let’s take the following indices:

company

an index containing information about companies; each document in the index has a field called city that contains the name of the city this company is located in

investor

an index containing articles; each document in the index has a field called city that contains the name of the city this investor is located in

city

an entity identifier which represent the concept of a city

There is no direct relation between investor and company but thanks to the city entity identifier the Relational Navigator is able to join the two. The following image shows a button for a relation using the entity identifier described previously.

Relational Navigator on the Investor dashboard

There are two possible destinations using is headquarter city of relation from the 15k investors currently displayed:

  • 9597 companies on All companies dashboard.

  • 1232 companies on Companies timeline analysis dashboard.

Ordering

Click on the Order button to switch the ordering:

Order by dashboards first

There are two possible ways to navigate the tree of possible destinations, we can order by:

dashboards - where you first see the relation and then the destination dashboards

Order by dashboards first

relations - where you first see the destination dashboards and then which relation you can reach it with

Order by relation first

Configuration

All possible relations are discovered automatically.

Grouping

You can group entity relations by label by checking Group entity table relations:

Relational Navigator settings

When the option is enabled, the target dashboards for relations with the same name will be grouped together:

Relational Navigator grouping

Hierarchy types (layout)

There are two possible values:

Normal - the entity identifiers subtree layout is EIDs → relations → dashboards or EID → dashboards → relations

Light - the entity identifiers subtree layout is collapsed into EIDs → relations → dashboards or EID → dashboards → relations

The following image shows the Light layout activated

Relational Navigator settings

Hiding and showing relations

Use the visibility buttons to hide or show individual relations. All relations are visible by default.

To set the default visibility to false, select the Make relations invisible by default checkbox.

Changing the default visibility doesn’t apply to relations that were individually hidden or made visible.

Relational Navigator settings