Index - Amazon Kendra
Using Amazon Kendra reserved or common document fieldsSearching indexes

Index

An index holds the contents of your documents and is structured in a way to make the documents searchable. The way you add documents to the index depends on how you store your documents.

  • If you store your documents in some kind of repository, such as an Amazon S3 bucket or a Microsoft SharePoint site, you use a data source connector to index your documents from your repository.

  • If you don't store your documents in a repository, you use the BatchPutDocument API to directly index your documents.

  • For FAQ questions and answers, which must be stored in an Amazon Kendra (Amazon S3) bucket, you upload them from the bucket

You can create indexes with the Amazon Kendra console, the AWS CLI, or an AWS SDK. For information about the types of documents that can be indexed, see Document types.

Using Amazon Kendra reserved or common document fields

With the UpdateIndex API, you can create reserved or common fields using DocumentMetadataConfigurationUpdates and specifying the Amazon Kendra reserved index field name to map to your equivalent document attribute/field name. You can also create custom fields. If you use a data source connector, most include field mappings that map your data source document fields to Amazon Kendra index fields. If you use the console, you update fields by selecting your data source, selecting the edit action, and then proceeding next to the field mappings section for configuring the data source.

You can configure the Search object to set a field as either displayable, facetable, searchable, and sortable. You can configure the Relevance object to set a field's rank order, boost duration or time period to apply to boosting, freshness, importance value, and importance values mapped to specific field values. If you use the console, you can set the search settings for a field by selecting the facet option in the navigation menu. To set relevance tuning, select the option to search your index in the navigation menu, enter a query, and use the side panel options to tune the search relevance. You cannot change the field type once you have created the field.

Amazon Kendra has the following reserved or common document fields that you can use:

  • _authors—A list of one or more authors responsible for the content of the document.

  • _category—A category that places a document in a specific group.

  • _created_at—The date and time in ISO 8601 format that the document was created. For example, 2012-03-25T12:30:10+01:00 is the ISO 8601 date-time format for March 25th 2012 at 12:30PM (plus 10 seconds) in Central European Time.

  • _data_source_id—The identifier of the data source that contains the document.

  • _document_body—The content of the document.

  • _document_id—A unique identifier for the document.

  • _document_title—The title of the document.

  • _excerpt_page_number—The page number in a PDF file where the document excerpt appears. If your index was created before September 8, 2020, you must re-index your documents before you can use this attribute.

  • _faq_id—If this is a question-answer type document (FAQ), a unique identifier for the FAQ.

  • _file_type—The file type of the document, such as pdf or doc.

  • _last_updated_at—The date and time in ISO 8601 format that the document was last updated. For example, 2012-03-25T12:30:10+01:00 is the ISO 8601 date-time format for March 25th 2012 at 12:30PM (plus 10 seconds) in Central European Time.

  • _source_uri—The URI where the document is available. For example, the URI of the document on a company website.

  • _version—An identifier for the specific version of a document.

  • _view_count—The number of times that the document has been viewed.

  • _language_code (String)—The code for a language that applies to the document. This defaults to English if you do not specify a language. For more information on supported languages, including their codes, see Adding documents in languages other than English.

For custom fields, you create these fields using DocumentMetadataConfigurationUpdates with the UpdateIndex API, just as you do when creating a reserved or common field. You must set the appropriate data type for your custom field. If you use the console, you update fields by selecting your data source, selecting the edit action, and then proceeding next to the field mappings section for configuring the data source. Some data sources don't support adding new fields or custom fields. You cannot change the field type once you have created the field.

The following are the types you can set for custom fields:

  • Date

  • Number

  • String

  • String list

If you added documents to the index using BatchPutDocument API, Attributes lists the fields/attributes of your documents and you create fields using the DocumentAttribute object.

For documents indexed from an Amazon S3 data source, you create fields using a JSON metadata file that includes the fields information.

If you use a supported database as your data source, you can configure your fields using the field mappings option.

Searching indexes

After you create an index, you can start searching your documents. For more information, see Searching indexes.