What is Search by Strategy?

Spinque promotes Search by Strategy, an iterative 2-stage search process that separates search strategy definition (the how) from the actual searching and browsing of the collection (the what). This concept has evolved from experiences in various search tasks.

Search by Strategy allows information specialists to model, test and refine their search workflows at a high level of abstraction, with the help of a graphical tool. Any intermediate results can be inspected, keeping search transparent and the information specialist in control. Successful search strategies can be kept for future re-use, or deployed as an automatically generated search engine for end users, which runs on a relational database system.

High-level domain-specific search tasks are expressed in terms of modular and customisable building blocks. The magic that yet enables a fully automatic processing of the resulting data flow is found in our specific take on mixing information retrieval theory and databases (with foundations in over two decades of scientific research). Thanks to the visual and intuitive tooling, the full power of our technology can be exploited by domain specialists - who we consider the search experts for their area of knowledge. Thanks to the fully automatic processing of search strategies, hidden from the end user, no specific technological expertise is required to make the most out of your data!

Key features of the Search by Strategy approach

• Interactively defining and executing search strategies
• Searching through multiple data sources at once
• Exploring and refining search results interactively by means of facetted browsing
• Display metadata by (fuzzy) facets of choice
• Providing understandable search results which improve your output