Ambiguity
is a state in which there is more than one possible meaning in your query.
For example, if you want to query the portal for John Doe’s
employee information, and you enter Show employee
info for John Doe, the network cannot determine
which agent should handle the request because you did not enter “show” into
the agent network as a synonym for either the Execute or Send agent.
Another example of a query that could cause ambiguity is if you have an application called “chart” and you assigned “stock” as an application synonym for chart. If you make the request get stock, the system sees two applications–stock and chart. When this happens the system executes the first application returned from the database.
To resolve conflicts such as the ones shown in the preceding examples, the Agent Network executes in this order:
Exact match of application names
Exact match of application synonyms
Exact match of fields and field synonyms
Substring match of application names
Substring match of application synonyms
Substring match of field and field synonyms
If there is ambiguity in your query and the agent network cannot resolve the query, you receive a list of applications from which you can select the one you want to use to execute the query.
If you are using multiple co-brands in your portal, Sybase recommends that you limit the number of applications you co-host within a single co-brand and use alternative co-brands to separate related applications to reduce the possibility of ambiguities.
When creating an Answers Anywhere application, click the “Check Conflicts” button to check for potential ambiguities with other applications in that particular co-brand. See “Enabling Answers Anywhere (natural language search)”.
