Fluid Topics Glossary

The Fluid Topics glossary defines Fluid Topics-related concepts, terms, expressions, and abbreviations.

  • A

    • Admin Console: The Fluid Topics admin console or user interface is an interface that allows an administrator to configure and monitor the portal and its components. You can manage your content processing and rendering, UI branding, security, analytics, and users rights and roles, from the same control panel.
    • AI: AI or Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines and software and more particularly, computer systems. Fluid Topics’ strong expertise in search technology and AI is grounded in two decades of research and development. From content processing and search to metadata indexing and analytics, our advanced AI algorithms are pre-trained and optimized to ingest, unify, and serve content. Additionally, Fluid Topics uses AI-powered natural language processing to help users find anything they’re looking for in just milliseconds.
    • Apache Spark: Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing.
    • Apache Cassandra: Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL distributed database designed to process large volumes of data.
    • API: An API or Application Programming Interface is a set of functions and procedures that allow two applications to talk to one another. They also enable the creation of applications and can interfere with the data and features of other applications, services, or operating systems. Fluid Topics’ API-first architecture enables unlimited integration capabilities with your existing systems, tools and sources. We offer APIs and SDKs to build bespoke connectors for proprietary data sources.
    • Authoring tools: An authoring tool or software is a program used by technical writers, and documentation and learning professionals to create and arrange content into a standardized structure. Fluid Topics comes ready with a set of processing pipelines to ingest content written with different authoring tools (i.e. Madcap Flare, Author-IT, Confluence, Adobe FrameMaker,..) and easily process it.
  • C

    • CCMS: CCMS stands for Component Content Management System. A CCMS is a relational database with content broken down and stored in components. This variant architecture is highly searchable and robust due to the granularity of the content being managed, which means you can store and easily manage large volumes of content without losing control of your documentation. CCMS are designed to simplify and streamline an organization’s technical documentation process.
    • Clustering: Clustering is the action of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (or cluster) are more similar to each other than to those in other groups. In Fluid Topics it is possible to group together documents that share metadata so that they appear as a single result in the Search page. Documents that are clustered together are more user-friendly than a long list of individual documents.
    • Community portal: A community portal is a website or an online platform that provides information, knowledge articles, self-service modules, and a dedicated place for discussion. With Fluid Topics, you can serve your content, in your community portal or software (e.g. Salesforce Service Cloud or Community Cloud).
    • Connector: A connector is a processing pipeline that ingests any type of content, whether structured or unstructured. Fluid Topics comes with a set of ready-to-use connectors for the most common sources (i.e. MadCap Flare, Paligo, FrameMaker…) and formats (i.e. DITA, Word, Markdown, AsciiDoc, XML…). Since Fluid Topics is an open platform, ad hoc connectors can also be added to handle specific formats.
    • Content Analytics: Content Analytics encompasses a wide variety of metrics to give you a visual display of exactly what your users are doing with your documentation. Fluid Topics Analytics are designed from the ground up to optimize authoring and improve the user experience. We capture every user interaction with high levels of detail and deep context. You’ll see what content was viewed down to the topic level, and for how long, every keyword search, selected facet, most popular searches and searches with no results, and much more. The main goals of Content Analytics are to identify content gaps, evaluate the alignment of the documentation with the users’ needs and prioritize content work on assets that will be truly useful to your users.
    • Content Enrichment: Content Enrichment is the action of applying new and modern content processing techniques such as natural language processing, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence to add structure, context, and metadata to content and make it more accessible, findable, and useful to both humans and computers.
    • Context-sensitive help: Context-sensitive help is information provided to users based on the context of the task in which they are involved and the environment they’re in. Fluid Topics provide deep linking functionalities that automatically associate help topics with the context in which the user is working, enabling efficient online help.
    • CSS: CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. CSS is designed to enable the separation of presentation and content, including layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility.
    • Customer Journey: A Customer Journey refers to the path followed by a customer via different touch points before making a purchase decision.
  • D

    • DITA: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture or DITA is an XML standard that describes the architecture for creating and managing information. It is used for authoring, producing, and delivering technical documentation. Fluid Topics comes ready with a set of processing pipelines to ingest your content in its native format. You can easily publish DITA content without reformatting it first.
    • Documentation Portal: A documentation portal is a knowledge center that hosts specific, detailed product content owned by a company. It can either be public or restricted to specific users and may serve several purposes such as product support and maintenance, or sales assistance. Fluid Topics helps companies quickly build rich content experiences through their documentation portal to serve various audiences: internal and external users, support services, partners, and more. In complete autonomy, you can implement an out-of-the-box portal to serve relevant, targeted, and personalized information to your users.
  • E

    • Enterprise Search: The term “enterprise search” describes the software used to search for information inside a corporate organization. Fluid Topics has developed its proprietary search engine and our technology scores 25% better in academic benchmarks than classic, open-source solutions such as Elasticsearch and SolR.
  • F

    • Facets: Facets allow users to filter search results in order to zero in on specific information quickly. When a user selects a filter, Fluid Topics scans the facets associated with each document and topic and displays only those with the corresponding metadata.
  • K

    • Knowledge Hub: The Knowledge Hub (KHUB) is a central repository of all the product resources owned by a company. It serves as a single access point for all digital channels and ensures that the product information is delivered securely when and where it’s needed. Fluid Topics’ technology collects product content from all sources and formats, unifies it, and transforms it into a smart knowledge hub that provides users with consistent, reliable product information across all touch points.
  • M

    • Markdown: Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor.
    • Metadata: Metadata is data that describes other data, providing a structured reference that helps sort and identify attributes of the information it describes. In the field of technical documentation, it can be defined as a piece of information associated with a document, such as a title, version, or product.  Fluid Topics uses all metadata available in your content to enhance the search relevance and to provide a more personalized experience.
  • N

    • Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing or NLP is the ability of a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken and written which in turn allows humans to successfully interact with the computer using natural sentences. NLP technology is used in Fluid Topics to enhance search relevance.
  • O

    • Offline Documentation: Documentation that is accessible without any internet connexion, on an internal network or directly on the user’s device. With Fluid Topics Offline mode, it is easy to make your technical content available under any circumstances. Whether your users work in secured environments, have poor connectivity, or no network coverage,  Fluid Topics provides them the same content experience online and offline.
    • OpenAPI: The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard, programming language-agnostic interface description for APIs. OpenAPI is widely used by developers and, as such, represents a common format for API documentation. Fluid Topics offers a native connector to collect and ingest OpenAPI content.
    • Out-of-the-box Portal: Fluid Topics offers a turnkey portal that can de be deployed in minutes. The portal can then be easily configured using our WYSIWYG editor.
  • R

    • Responsive Design: Responsive web design is about creating web pages that look good on all devices. Fluid Topics’ documentation portals provide a fully responsive web design experience.
  • S

    • SaaS: Software as a Service or SaaS is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is generally hosted on cloud systems. It is currently opposed to “on-premise” models based on installations on the company’s own servers and IT environment. Fluid Topics is available on both “SaaS” and “On-Premise” models.
    • SDK: A SDK or Software Development Kit is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. Fluid Topics provides you with multiple SDKs to add connectors from any in-house or proprietary source.
    • Semantic Search: Semantic search is a data searching technique that aims to determine the intent and contextual meaning of the words a person is using for search. Fluid Topics leverages more than two decades of research and expertise in data enrichment and semantic search engine technology, which makes it the most relevant search engine for technical documentation on the market.
    • SSO: Single Sign-On or SSO is a centralized authentification mechanism in which the client application fully delegates authentication to a trustworthy external service. At Fluid Topics, our Professional Services team is here to help you with SSO configuration.
    • Static documentation: Static documentation is a documentation that comprises statically generated web pages or files that are read-only and allow no user interaction or feedback.
    • Structured content: Structured content refers to information or content that has been broken down into individual component parts and classified using metadata. Creating structured content enables us to assemble, reuse, or personalize it for different users or platforms.
  • T

    • Taxonomy: Taxonomy for search engines refers to classification methods that improve relevance in vertical search. Taxonomies of entities are tree structures whose nodes are labeled with entities likely to occur in a search query. Fluid Topics leverages your own taxonomy in order to provide the best search experience.
    • Technical Documentation: Technical documentation can be any document created to describe the use, functionality or architecture of a product, system or service. Fluid Topics collects and unifies all the technical documentation a company owns, no matter the source and format, and transforms it into a smart knowledge hub that smartly delivers information that is tailored to the user and fits to the channel.
    • Turnkey solution: Turnkey solutions are ready-to-go solutions that are easily deployed in a business. Fluid Topics comes pre-tuned, ready for your brand, and provides you with a working solution for your technical documentation publishing in a matter of days or weeks.
  • U

    • Unstructured content: An unstructured document (UD) is any document that is not in a structured format, like a PDF file or a JPG image. Fluid Topics supports all types of unstructured documents and fully indexes the vast majority of them to improve findability. Additionally, Fluid Topics automatically restructures common formats to provide the same content experience as with structured content.
    • User experience: The user experience is how a user interacts with a product, system or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. At Fluid Topics, we put all our efforts into offering the best user experience including a high-level readability, increased content findability, and rich engagement capabilities.
  • W

    • Web application: A Web application is an application program that is stored on a remote server and delivered over the Internet through a browser interface. Thanks to a rich API set, Fluid Topics’ functionalities such as searching, reading, configuring or monitoring are designed to integrate with your own web applications.
    • Wiki: A Wiki is a website or database developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content. Wikis are one of the multiple sources of content that Fluid Topics can ingest and restructure.
    • WYSIWYG Editor: WYSIWYG, an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance. Fluid Topics has its own WYSIWYG Editor, with out-of-the-box widgets and an easy-to-use interface to help you fully customize your portal.
  • X

    • XML-based formats: The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple text-based format for representing structured information: documents, data, configuration, and much more. Most of the technical writing solutions are based on XML content models (such as DITA or DocBook).
  • Y

    • YAML: YAML is a human-readable data-serialization language commonly used for configuration files and applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML content is one of the multiple sources of structured content that Fluid Topics can ingest.