In the Crystal world, a Topic is a subject related to your business metrics that you can talk to Crystal about. A topic is an insight on your data that you can get from crystal.

You can get an overview of Topics here.

Topics can only be created by the Admins. For Admins, in fact, Topics are one of the most crucial parts of the crystal experience: this is the reason why they should spend the majority of their time in the Console, setting up Topics.

The Topic Management Area is where the topic creation and management processes take place. Here you can either find and manage the already existing topics and add new ones, according to your needs.

But how does this process work? Let’s see.

The Steps of Topic Creation

Topics are created through a four-step process.

Connect

Connect a data source and select the specific tables that hold the desired data for your topic.

In order to retrieve insights on your business, crystal needs to get data from somewhere! That’s why the first step in the topic creation process is called connect. During this phase the Admins will connect a data source (i.e., database or data warehouse systems) and build topics around that data.

They will also choose the tables to use for the configuration.

Configure

Configure a topic by setting its objective and the related visualization type and selecting specific columns and parameters (e.g. establishing a ranking among values or comparing different values).

Once you have selected the data to build your topic, you have to select its objective. An objective is essentially the insight you want to get out of this data (such as a comparison, ranking or progress overview of your data).

During this passage, Admins will choose the topic’s objective based on their needs and on what they want to achieve with that data: for example, a comparison among different data, a ranking of data or an over time progression. Each objective could be visually represented by one or more visualizations, for example a single line chart, a table or a donut chart.

Based on the objective you’ve chosen, you'll be guided through selecting the ideal visualization for your topic, in order to shape your data and express valuable insight.

In this phase Admins will have to select the specific columns from the data source’s tables to involve in the topic creation and they will decide whether to group or aggregate data in a certain way. This phase is crucial because it determines how the topic will be.

Filter

Once you’ve created your visualizations, you can optionally add filters to drill down on specific data within the charts, such as zoning in on a specific country or timeframe for your sales data.

This is the only non-mandatory step of the topic creation process. Admins can decide to add filters (for example, for country) to their topic in order to better detail the questions and to enrich the conversational experience for the members: such filters will, in fact, be available for the queries. It is therefore highly recommended to use filters.

For example, if the topic is Sales over time, a filter might be “in Italy”, if referred to the column “country”.

Train

The train step is the fourth and final step of creating a topic. In this stage, admins will help train crystal, so that she will be able to understand the users' requests and their language and to learn the business specific words and jargon.

To do so, they will have to define entities and aliases, which are name variations or trigger words that refer to the metrics used when talking to crystal to make sure she provides the right insights. For example, if a topic is named Sales, the alias could be Incomes: during the conversation, the advisor will understand that both words refer to the same topic.

During the train step, the system will suggest some sample questions to ask crystal based on the chosen configuration.

Complete

Finally, you’ll decide who can see the topic by setting permissions and ask crystal about it, review and publish it!

After the topic creation process is completed, there are still two passages to go through before the topic is ready for the conversation: the first one is to assign permissions, or, in other words, to decide which member users will be able to see this topic in the advisor and in the Dashboard and ask questions about it.

The second one is publishing: a topic can be kept in draft or ready status, but it’s only when it is published that it will be available for members and their questions during the conversation.

Summary

In summary, you’ll need to follow this flow to create topics for asking questions to your advisor:

1. Adding a data source (you should only have to do this a few times)

2. Selecting data tables for your topic

3. Setting an objective and a visualization for topic

4. Adding filters to your objectives

5. Defining entities for your data

6. Setting permissions for topics

7. Reviewing & publishing topics

Check the specific articles to know more about each step!