Office Graph API documentation updated with additional capabilities
Recently, during my Office Graph presentation at the SharePoint Connect Amsterdam, I mentioned a few hidden gems in the Office Graph API. Those capabilities have just been included in the official Graph Query Language documentation on MSDN.
Office Graph and Delve
Office Graph allows you to retrieve personalized content from across Office 365. Powered by the Office Graph, Delve allows you to discover new and relevant content for you and helps you stay in the know. Whereas Office Delve is a fixed experience, Office Graph is an API that can be leveraged for building custom search and discovery solutions.
Office Graph API
Currently the Office Graph API is in preview and will very likely change in the future. Nevertheless, it already offers great capabilities and allows you to start thinking about the new ways of discovering relevant content. To help us understand the Office Graph and get real-life feedback, Microsoft has published documentation explaining what Office Graph is and how it can be used.
New Office Graph capabilities included in the documentation
With the recent update to the Office Graph documentation the following capabilities have been documented:
- actorCombination
- GraphRestrictionMode
- getting additional edges from the Office Graph
Sorting Graph Query results for multiple actors using the actorCombination parameter
Using Office Graph queries you can retrieve information relevant for one specific person, like yourself, but also content trending around a group of people. Particularly in the later case you will want to decide which results are the most relevant around that group of people. Using the actorCombination parameter you can choose how you want to calculate the overall relevance given the information from the specific edges retrieved for all actors specified in the query.
The actorCombination parameter is a very valuable capability when working with multiple actors and which I haven’t discussed during my presentation at SharePoint Connect Amsterdam.
GraphRestrictionMode
When you set the GraphQuery property on a search query, SharePoint 2013 Search will automatically consider the query an Office Graph Query rather than a regular search query. In some cases this might however be not what you intended. Imagine for example the following scenario where you would like to allow users to perform regular search queries, but when presenting the results you would want to include some additional information regarding the social activity around those results. By setting the GraphRestrictionMode parameter to false you could retrieve information from the Office Graph without influencing the regular search ranking presenting your users with richer, and perhaps even more useful, search results.
Getting additional edges from the Office Graph
When composing Office Graph queries, all edges specified in the query are automatically returned in the query. But what if you wanted to include additional edges on top of what you are querying for? This is exactly what Delve is doing on the Home board: it queries for content trending around you, but additionally it retrieves information about when those items have been viewed, modified, etc. This new section of the documentation explains how to include additional edges in your Office Graph queries.
Summary
Office Graph is the API powering Delve and which allows you to retrieve personalized and relevant content from across Office 365. Recently the API documentation has been updated and now includes information about additional capabilities that are very helpful when building custom solutions using the Office Graph.
View: Updated documentation about querying the Office Graph using GQL on MSDN