What's the difference between Voyager Server and Vose?

Owned by Cooper Labenske
Last updated: Aug 11, 2022 by Heather Geyer
3 min read

Vose and Voyager Server complement each other and make analysis of huge data sets possible, but before describing how Voyager Server and Vose function together, it is useful to take a look at what Voyager Server is and what it does.

Voyager Server

Voyager Server itself is straightforward in design and capabilities. It's numerous functions include:

  • Overseeing Discovery and Indexing 

  • Displaying Search results in Navigo

  • Providing analysis through the Analytics function

  • Adding additional data manipulation tools through the Processing framework

A simple schematic diagram might look like the following:

 

Vose

Vose is Voyager's newest product, consisting of 

  • HQ, a central control panel for searching and administration

  • Distributed Indexing Agents, which an replace or augment existing indexing nodes

  • The Flex Index, based on SolrCloud, comes with built-in fail-over and load-balancing. Index data is organized into multiple logical pieces, or shards, that can be hosted on multiple machines. 

In addition, Vose has enhanced some of the features found in Voyager Server:

  • The set of Connectors is expanded and connectors are highly extensible

  • Working with Pipelines is streamlined and more intuitive, making it easier to enrich your data by adding tags, geotagging, normalizing metadata and more

  • Entity Extraction and NLP (Natural Language Processing) are used to pull out key terms that can group related items in taxonomies and filters Query Expansion broadens returns on your search so you don't miss anything in your query. For example, if you enter the term "river," documents with the word "stream" will also be returned.

  • Find Similar looks for documents with text and concepts that are similar to another document. This is helpful in if multiple versions of the same document exist.

Voyager Server and Vose

Vose takes on the tasks of Discovery and Indexing, but is designed to work in concert with Voyager Server, which contains Navigo for displaying search result, Analytics for providing charts of what has been indexed and the Management UI for setting up how the index is displayed and user security.

Voyager Server is still available as a standalone installation, but Vose is the key to analyzing larger data sets faster with more reliability. While Voyager Server does best with data sets that contain up to 10 million records. Vose, with the distributed Flex Index, can scale up to billions of records.

There are several ways to deploy Vose along with Voyager Server, depending on whether Voyager's embedded index or the Flex Index is used.

Deploying Vose Using the Embedded Index

The first adds HQ and Agents, but retains the built in (embedded) index of Voyager Server. This lets HQ and Agents increase indexing capabilities without having to move to a new index. In this scenario, Discovery and Indexing are directed by HQ via Agents; Voyager Server adds Navigo for displaying Search results, Analytics and the Management UI.

 

Deploying Vose Using the Flex Index

When the Flex Index is deployed, Voyager can accommodate huge datasets, up to billions of records. In this case, HQ manages Discovery, Indexing and the Flex Index. Voyager Server continues to proved functionality as in the example above.