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Concepts

For enterprise search only

If you have chosen a focused search instance read carefully the focused web search section, and then jump directly to the Query documents section in how to query the RESTful API.

Before geting your instance and starting to use it, there are some concepts that you need to be familiar with:

  • Document: A document is a piece of text divided in one or more fields. It can be understood as a form, where if you only need plain-free text you only use one field.

  • Collection: A collection is a set of documents. These documents can have different fields.

  • Index (Elasticsearch): An Elasticsearch index refers to the container of a certain type of collection.

  • Mapping (Elasticsearch Mapping): An Elasticsearch mapping specifies the structure of a collection, and therefore that of the document type that belong to it. It also contains other properties used to improve search results and performance. From now on it will be refered as mapping.

  • Schema (JSON Schema): A JSON Schema represents the structure of the above mentioned Elasticsearch mapping in JSON format. From now on it will be refered as schema.

Examples

If you have doubts about documents, collections, schemas or indexes there is a full example in the usage section.