FCS Aggregator

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The Aggregator application is a part of the CLARIN-FCS common federated content search infrastructure.

It serves as a user interface to perform queries to CLARIN-FCS resources and display search results. It communicates with components called endpoints, which are provided as a service by all centers who participate in the federated content search. Each endpoint provides access to one or more searchable resources. The user can select a specific resource or resources, based on the resource name or on the language, or search in all of them. The content of these resources is searched with the query supplied to the endpoint. The endpoint returns results to this query and the aggregator collects the responses from all the endpoints and displays them to the user.

Contents

Using FCS Aggregator

FCS Aggregator is available here. No login required.


Sending a query

To send a query and get search results it is enough to enter a search term and click Search button or press Enter key. The default search options will apply: all available in FCS corpora resources, any language, 10 hits per resource per search request. If you have navigated to Aggregator from VLO and resources selected in VLO are found among the corpora resources available (e.g. TuebaDDC), then the search will be performed only in those selected resources.

Specify a search term

In the search field on the top of the Aggregator page enter your search term.

Restrict the search

This step is optional. It describes how to restrict search by language or by selecting a specific resource or resources. By default, the search will be performed in all the available in FCS infrastructure endpoint resources. Or, if you have navigated to Aggregator from VLO, only in those resources selected in VLO.

  • Specify language of the resource:
    On the Search options tab, click on the Language button bar, and select the language.
    Clicking on the language bar after that will close the select option, but the selected language will be saved.
  • Specify corpora to search in:
    On the Search options tab, click on the Corpora button bar. By default all the corpora resources are selected. If you want to restrict your search to a specific resource or resources, deselect all corpora and select only those of interest.
    Some corpora have sub-resources. Open on the specific corpora item to see if it has sub-resources. You can also select sub-resources to be searched.
  • Specify number of records per resource per request:
    By default, 10 records per resource is returned. You can increase this number to 20 or 30 by clicking on Maximum hits button bar of the Search options tab and selecting the number. You can inspect more records after the first 10/20/30 hits are returned by clicking next arrow at the Search Results page.
Perform the search

Click Search button.


Inspecting the search result

Search results will appear at the Search results tab. It is opened automatically when the Search button is clicked. The query is sent to all the selected corpora and the search results from resources are displayed on the first responds - first displayed basis. Therefore, you can start inspecting the search results (the records) before all the corpora have returned a response. Progress bar at the bottom of the page gives an information about the awaiting responses.

Displayed records

The search results are displayed in a concordance view. The searched term in the middle, and left and right contexts. Some records have a permanent identifier (PID) and a reference. Click on the i icon to inspect PID and/or reference. Each resource returns a number of records specified in Maximum hits field of Search options (or 10 as default). Scroll down the page to see all the results.

Next records

As soon as all the resources respond, the next arrow appears at the bottom of the Search results page. Clicking it will perform a new query request to the same resources with the same search term, but with the records starting at the end of the currently displayed records. For example, if the number of records is set to 10, after the fist search each resource returns the first 10 records found (if any). Then after clicking next each resource will return next 10 records found for the given search term.


What's next

You can save search results for further inspection, process them with WebLicht, or start a completely new search.

Save the search results

There is an option to export the results into personal workspace (click Export to Personal Workspace) or download locally on your computer (click Download). Several formats are offered for exporting search results.

Process with WebLicht

To process the search results with WebLicht application, click Use WebLicht button and select with search results as text or with search results as TCF. The option with search results as TCF only appears if the language has been selected as German in the Search options tab.

Start a new search

You can perform a new search following the steps outlined above, for example changing the query term and/or searchable resources.