Query facets

OSS can treat fields as 'information facets' - that is, as a classification mechanism.

In plain English, faceted fields are considered to be categories, and the search engine will indicate which documents fall within each such category, and what is the population count within each such category.

For instance, a database of cookies could be queried with the fields "size", "flavour" and "brand"' as facets. If "size" is a faceted field, and has possible values of "Small, Medium, Large" the search will return how many Small, Medium and Large cookies are among the results of the current search.

Using facets is particularly useful to offer additional filtering to users - for instance to offer the option narrow down the search to one or two of the three cookie sizes.

Multivalued toggle

A multivalued field is one that can belong to several facets - in our example, a cookie that is sold under several brands.

At this stage of the OSS development roadmap, multivalued fields have to be declared by manually setting the toggle to "Yes".

Minimal count

Defaulting at zero, the minimal count can be raised to diminish the noise from facets with a low number of occurrences. In our example, if only one cookie in the query is "Large", setting the minimal count to two will only indicate how many cookies are "Small" and "Medium", with "Large" not being considered a viable category for the current search.