Two part question regarding 11.2.x Dashboards' Exploration.

[FerdH4]

I've posed these same two questions to IBM Cognos Product Management and only get crickets.  So, I thought I'd try the experts here too.

Does anyone know anything about how Cognos chooses the data items which it presents when starting a new Exploration.  Specific in these two instances:

1.  When starting a new Exploration, there are data items offered up on the "Select a starting point" | "Try starting with one of these... [data items]" pane.  In my proprietary data source, this pane offers me 20 data items.  But, I have been unable to determine how/why Analytics is offering me those specific data items.

2.  After selecting one of the data items offered up in the "Try starting with one of these... [data items]" pane, then the data relationships diagram / card opens.  Here again, I am unable to determine how/why Analytics is displayed the set of data items  which are supposedly "related" to the data item I originally chose.  I know that the "Relationship strength" slider can cause for some data items to be hidden. 

I'm just trying to get a general handle on and make sense of how Analytics selects these data items.  Any hints or breadcrumbs would be greatly appreciated.

[MFGF]

I've posed these same two questions to IBM Cognos Product Management and only get crickets.  So, I thought I'd try the experts here too.

Does anyone know anything about how Cognos chooses the data items which it presents when starting a new Exploration.  Specific in these two instances:

1.  When starting a new Exploration, there are data items offered up on the "Select a starting point" | "Try starting with one of these... [data items]" pane.  In my proprietary data source, this pane offers me 20 data items.  But, I have been unable to determine how/why Analytics is offering me those specific data items.

2.  After selecting one of the data items offered up in the "Try starting with one of these... [data items]" pane, then the data relationships diagram / card opens.  Here again, I am unable to determine how/why Analytics is displayed the set of data items  which are supposedly "related" to the data item I originally chose.  I know that the "Relationship strength" slider can cause for some data items to be hidden. 

I'm just trying to get a general handle on and make sense of how Analytics selects these data items.  Any hints or breadcrumbs would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

To the best of my knowledge, Cognos Analytics runs an analysis of the data set internally to figure out the statistical relationships and heuristics of the data items. None of this is surfaced to regular users, though, other than the message you see after uploading a file that says "Analyzing" or the option to enrich a published package in the portal. Bottom line, it's pretty much a black box. The items you see in presented as starting points in an exploration, and the related items once you pick a data item are driven by the results of that analysis. I guess there's a development team within IBM who could tell you exactly how it works, but getting to them would be a challenge, I suspect.

Cheers!

MF.