General Concepts

Where capitalized, words refer to their meaning in this section.

Squirro is a powerful tool to gather, understand and act on any type of data (the ‘3X model’).

Every atomic piece of information that is in some way distinct in the real world (such as an individual log entry, an individual e-mail or notes from a single call) is displayed as an individual item in Squirro. We refer to these items as documents. Documents arrive into Squirro from sources. Documents, searches and other operations are organized within a project in Squirro.

A user may have permissions to access one or more projects. The documents within a project are referred to as the project’s corpus. The corpus is held in a special database known as the index. A single installation of Squirro, comprising multiple projects, is called an instance.

Each document can be assigned values for multiple facets. These are displayed in the left side pane of the main search screen. A facet is a property of a document, such as which city a particular document mentions or is relating to in some way. A document may have one or multiple values for a facet. So, for instance, your itinerary for your flight from London to Lagos will have both London and Lagos as distinct values for a facet.

A Smart Filter is a special filter generated from a piece of text referred to as the training set. Squirro extracts the unique ‘fingerprint’ of the training set and tries to find matching documents.

Trend detection is a powerful feature of Squirro. It aims at finding outliers in the historical time-series data and get automatic email alerts for unusual/surprising patterns in data.