After you have set up different search fields, defined individual RSS feeds, and uploaded the appropriate data, you can start exploring the search field. The ITONICS Scout enables you to deep-dive into the data to gain as much insight as possible. These insights fuel your strategic foresight processes, add context to your existing radar views and potentially identify new emerging trends or technologies.

This article will explain how to explore your search fields:

• Explore and deep-dive into the semantic clusters
• Get an overview of the focus topics by looking at the term cloud
• Sift through the connected data by filtering and searching for relevant content

Click on Scout in the Navigation Menu to access all existing search fields.

Cluster view

The Cluster view creates semantic clusters and categories by scanning the title and abstract of each document within the search field. The cluster view visualizes those semantic clusters and indicates how many and which documents are categorized into each cluster.

By double-clicking on an individual cluster you can zoom in to explore the second-level clusters that are created within the top-level cluster.

Term cloud view

The term cloud visualizes the most often used terms within the title and abstract of all documents within the search field.

You can also blacklist certain terms by dragging unwanted terms for cleaning and more detailed term cloud views.

Filter options

You can also search and filter within each search field to fine-tune your queries and therefore to set the context or perspective for finding the desired information and insights. You can make use of the following filter options:

• Fulltext search
• Filter for your data sources
• Filter unread/read documents
• Filter marked documents
• Filter for the semantic clusters

For every applied filter the list of documents that is shown below the cluster view and the term cloud view is updated. You can also explore each document in more detail by looking at the document list. Each document consists of different data points depending on the document source and the attached meta information.