LogosLink User's Manual · LogosLink version 2.0.0

Collection

A collection is a group of documents in a corpus that you can treat as a whole.

There are three kinds of collections: manual, smart and random.

Details

A collection gathers a group of documents in a corpus and allows you to operate on them as a whole.

Types of collections

You can create three different kinds of collections: manual, smart and random. They differ in how they are created and how you can add and remove documents from them.

Manual collections

For manual collections, you manually pick which documents are in the collection. Manual collections allow you to create and curate groups of documents in a corpus according to any criterion that you want to use. A document will stay in a manual collection (our out of it) no matter what changes you make to it.

You can add a document to a manual collection by right-clicking the document and selecting the Add to Collection command in the context menu. Similarly, you can remove a document from a manual collection by right-clicking the document and selecting the Remove from Collection command in the context menu. You can add or remove multiple documents, or even all the active documents, to or from a collection, via the Add to Collection and Remove from Collection buttons that are available in the Document and Active Documents ribbon tabs.

Smart collections

For a smart collection, you establish the conditions that define what documents should belong in the collection, and LogosLink ensures that the collection will contain the right documents at any time. In other words, documents belong to a smart collection only if they fulfill the conditions that you establish. This means that a document may get in or out of a smart collection if you make changes to it. For example, if you create a smart collection containing all documents having a title that starts with "A", and then you change a document's title from "Report on China" to "A Report on China", that document will automatically be included in this collection, since its title now starts with "A".

You don't add or remove documents from a smart collection. Rather, LogosLink moves documents in and out of smart collections automatically depending on the conditions that you have set and the documents' properties.

The conditions or criteria that define a smart collection are expressed as a filter.

Random collection

A random collection takes a random sample of documents from the corpus or another collection. For random collections, you set the source from which documents are to be taken (the whole corpus or another collection), and a maximum number of documents to take. From that point on, the collection will randomly populate itself with at most the maximum number of documents from the given source. If you set the Auto refresh option for the random collection, the collection will re-populate itself randomly every time you use it.

Working with collections

You can create and manage collections in a corpus through the Create Collection and Manage Collections buttons in the Corpus ribbon tab of the Corpus window.

Managing collections allows you to view a list of the collections in the corpus and operate on them. For example, you can join two collections into a resulting one, or obtain the intersection or difference between collections. This allows you to refine your collections stepwise when you have very large and complex corpora.

You can also make a collection active. When a collection is active, only the documents that belong to it are shown in the corpus list or tree. Also, any commands in the Active Documents ribbon tab that you execute will only apply to the documents in the collection. In addition, any corpus statistics or analytics that you run will only take into account the documents in the collection. In other words, making a collection active is like temporarily discarding all the documents that do not belong to the collection, and restructing the scope of everything you do in LogosLink to those in the collection.

To make a collection active, simply select it from the Active collection drop-down box in the Documents panel of the Corpus window. If you select "(no collection)", then no collection is active and whole corpus is shown and affected by any operations you carry out on it.