200 Lotus Discovery Server 2.0
7.3.4 Affinity changes
In addition to the facility for an administrator to remove an affinity from a user's
profile, affinity changes also happen automatically over time.
Discovery Server examines the affinities of people to categories over time and, if
appropriate, will reduce the affinity of a person to a certain category, if that
person has less to do with that category. This process happens in the following
manner:
If a person has an affinity to a category and that affinity is not changing, the
affinity of that person to the category will reduce (decay) by 1% of its value
every day (for example, 100 to 99 to 98.01 to 97.02 etc.). This only happens if
other affinities (for other people) to that category are updated. If no affinities
are changing in the category, all of them stay the same. The end result is that
people who are regarded as “active” in the category (for example, through
document ownership or activity) remain with a high affinity, while inactive
people slowly have their affinity reduced.
As soon as the person has a change to his/her affinity to that category, the
decay is removed and they regain their original affinity rank. This is done
because Discovery Server doesn’t really consider them to have “lost
knowledge”—they are just less active. As soon as they are active in this area
again, they “deserve” their prior score.
The score bottoms out at 1 because Discovery Server never removes
affinities from categories unless people decline them, or an administrator
removes them from someone's profile.
7.4 Metrics reporting
People metrics (affinities) and document metrics are shown in various places in
the Discovery Server user interface, as outlined in 7.3.2, “How affinities are
shown by Discovery Server”. In addition to document and affinity values
displayed in the Discovery Server user interface, individuals with administrator
access to Discovery Server can use the metrics report generator, available in the
Discovery Server Control Center, to generate on-screen reports.
Standard reports
The standard metrics reports available in the Discovery Server Control Center
are as follows.
Top authors by document value
Top categories by activity
Top documents by access
Chapter 7. Metrics and affinities 201
Top documents by link source
Top documents by link target
Top document by responses
Top documents by value
Custom reports
In addition to standard reports available with Discovery Server, it is possible to
create custom reports.
Figure 7-5, and Figure 7-7 on page 203 show the parameters available for
custom reports for categories, documents and people.
Figure 7-5 Categories
202 Lotus Discovery Server 2.0
Figure 7-6 Documents
Chapter 7. Metrics and affinities 203
Figure 7-7 People
Metrics reporting using the Discovery Server API
It is also possible to use the Discovery Server API to access metrics information
in Discovery Server. You can use this to create your own custom reports, or to
use the retrieved information in other systems. You may wish to provide some
reports to your users via an intranet page or to create an automatically printed
report on a periodic basis.
The Discovery Server API provides a sample, MetricsSample, that uses the
LDSMetrics, LDSMetricsQuery, and LDSMetricsResults classes to extract
metrics information from Discovery Server.
More information on the Discovery Server API can be found in Section 8.4,
“Integration using Discovery Server programming interfaces” on page 231.
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