View the metadata of a source

Content metadata is data found within the items you index with your source. It’s likely that you’ll want to index at least part of your content metadata to take advantage of Coveo-powered search interface features such as facets, which let users filter out search results that have or haven’t the desired metadata values.

In your content system, metadata is stored in key-value pairs, and each pair holds a piece of data about a piece of content. For example, the date on which a content item was created is a piece of metadata. It can be stored as Date_Created: 2022-09-30 11:10 AM UTC, where Date_Created is the key and 2022-09-30 11:10 AM UTC is its value.

A mapping rule links a piece of your content metadata to a field in your Coveo index. It contains the name of the metadata key as it appears in your content system and is associated with a field of the Coveo index. A mapping rule indicates to Coveo which metadata value to retrieve and index as the value of a certain field.

Only the metadata that’s covered by a mapping rule is indexed and can be used to build a search interface. While Coveo automatically creates some mapping rules for you, it’s likely you’ll need to edit them and/or add more to index exactly the information you want. To help you with this process, the View and map metadata subpage showcases some of your metadata that Coveo found within your content, but hasn’t already indexed with a mapping rule. You should use it to see if there’s any additional information you want to index and use in your search interface.

To help you decide what to index, Coveo samples your items during the indexing process. You’ll learn more about the sampling process in the Item sampling criteria section below.

Then, the View and map metadata subpage displays a summary of the available metadata across the items in the sample. Its insight about the occurrence of keys and values should help you determine what to use in your Coveo-powered search interface.

For example, if you see that the language key appears in the metadata of 90% of the items in the sample, you may consider indexing this metadata to create a Language facet in your search interface. However, to make this decision, you should also consider the values of the language key. If the language key has only one value, it may not be useful to index it, as it won’t allow users to filter out items on your search page.

To access the View and map metadata subpage, on the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, select the desired source, and then, in the More menu, select View and map metadata.

On the View and map metadata subpage:

Expanding a key row reveals the five most frequent values in the items that have the selected key in their metadata. For example, let’s say in a sample of 50 items, 45 have the language key in their metadata. If you expand the language row, you’ll see that the value English is the most common within these 45 items, as it appears in 30 of them. French is the second most common, as it appears in 10 of the 45 items, etc.

Within the content it indexes, Coveo typically selects the items to include in the sample based on their uniqueness, values, or novelty, among other factors, to offer you a broad and relevant overview. For example, if an item has a new metadata key, it’s likely to be selected. Conversely, an item that has exactly the same metadata as multiple others in the content system is less likely to be selected.

The following table indicates the privileges required for members to access the View and map metadata subpage (see Manage privileges and Privilege reference).