2024:AI Search and the Search Page

2025 BETA

This article covers new or changed functionality in the current or upcoming beta version of Grooper. Features are subject to change before version 2025's GA release. Configuration and functionality may differ from later beta builds and the final 2025 release.

About

Put simply, Azure AI Search will make it easier to keep your documents in Grooper. To understand how, let's first understand what Grooper has been.

Historically Grooper has been a transient platform for document processing: documents come in, data is collected from those documents, then the data and documents are pushed out of Grooper to some place. It has never been a place to store documents and/or their data.

While it has been possible to keep Batches and their content in Grooper it has never been a best practice, nor has it been convenient, to do so. You could, theoretically, devise some kind of hierarchical foldering and naming convention by which you organize Batches in the node tree, but this is very time consuming and is probably not even that useful. Say you wanted to retrieve all "Invoices" that have a "Total Amount" over "$1,000.00". Without "indexing" the documents and their data, and the ability to "query" those indices, this would be extremely time consuming at best.

With Azure AI Search you will be able to quickly and efficiently index your documents and their data to allow for ease of retieval as well as gain a deeper understanding of them.

Microsoft Azure AI Search

Azure AI Search, formerly known as Azure Cognitive Search, is a cloud-based search-as-a-service solution provided by Microsoft Azure. It allows developers to build sophisticated search experiences into custom applications. Here are some key features and capabilities:

• Full-Text Search: Azure AI Search supports full-text search with capabilities like faceting, filtering, and scoring, allowing users to search through large volumes of text efficiently.
• Cognitive Skills Integration: It integrates with Azure AI Services to apply AI skills such as image recognition, language understanding, and text extraction to the indexed content. This makes it possible to enhance search results with AI-driven insights.
• Customizable Indexing: Developers can define custom indexes tailored to their specific data schema. This flexibility allows for a more relevant and precise search experience.
• Faceted Navigation: The service supports faceted navigation, enabling users to filter and drill down into search results based on predefined categories or attributes.
• Synonym Mapping: Azure AI Search includes synonym maps, which help handle variations in user queries by treating different terms with similar meanings as equivalent.
• Search Analytics: It provides insights into search patterns and behaviors, allowing developers to optimize the search experience based on user interactions.
• Scalability: The service can scale up or down based on the workload, making it suitable for applications of all sizes.
• Security and Compliance: Azure AI Search ensures data security and compliance with industry standards, offering features like role-based access control (RBAC), data encryption, and integration with Active Directory.
• Geospatial Search: It supports geospatial search capabilities, allowing users to perform location-based searches and filter results based on geographical data.
• APIs and SDKs: Azure AI Search provides REST APIs and client libraries for various programming languages, making it easy to integrate with different types of applications.

Azure AI Search is used in a variety of applications, including e-commerce sites, enterprise search portals, document management systems, and any other scenario where efficient and effective search capabilities are required.

Relevance of Azure AI Search with Grooper

• Enhanced Search Capabilities: Azure AI Search provides powerful full-text search functionalities that can be used to index and search large volumes of documents processed by Grooper.
• Cognitive Skills': Azure AI Search's cognitive skills can augment Grooper's capabilities by applying AI to extract insights, recognize entities, and understand the context within documents. This can enhance the data extraction and classification processes in Grooper.
• Scalability: Azure AI Search's ability to scale with the workload makes it suitable for handling the dynamic and often large-scale document processing tasks managed by Grooper.
• Advanced Filtering and Faceting: With features like faceting and filtering, users can refine their search results efficiently, making it easier to locate specific documents or information within a large dataset.

Integration with Grooper

• API Integration: Grooper can leverage Azure AI Search's REST APIs to automate the indexing of documents and retrieval of search results. This integration can be built into Grooper's workflow to ensure seamless data processing and search capabilities.
• Security and Compliance: Both Grooper and Azure AI Search offer robust security features. Integrating these ensures that document processing and search operations are secure and compliant with industry standards.
• Indexing Processed Documents: Once Grooper processes and extracts data from documents, this data can be sent to Azure AI Search for indexing. This allows users to search through the processed data quickly and efficiently.
• Querying Indexed Documents and Data: Once Azure Ai Search has indexed documents and their data from Grooper, user's can leverage powerful query syntax like Lucene and OData to efficiently retrieve the information from their documents.

Examkple Workflow

1. Document Acquisition: Grooper acquires documents from various sources (scanned images, PDFs, emails, etc.).
2. Data Extraction: Grooper processes these documents to extract structured data (text, metadata, images, etc.).
3. Transformation and Enrichment: The extracted data can be enriched using Grooper's capabilities or Azure AI Services.
4. Indexing: The processed and enriched data is sent to Azure AI Search for indexing.
5. Search and Retrieval: Users can perform searches on the indexed data using Azure AI Search's advanced search features. The results can be used within Grooper's Search interface.

How To

Create an Azure AI Search Service

Please refer to the following MSDN article about how to create an Azure AI Search service via their portal.

Configure the AI Search Repository Option

Configure an Indexing Behavior on a Content Type

Index Documents and Data from Grooper

Use the Search Page