Mines administration

When reviewers must review large batches of documents, you can use mines to facilitate the review process.

Mines are useful for the following reasons:

When you do not know where to start

To remove irrelevant documents from an initial review

To quickly review document data and determine key terms and concepts

In a mine, similar documents are clustered together based on conceptual similarity. The clusters of related documents appear in a map that provides a visual representation of the relationships between documents. For example, an email about a particular subject appears in the same cluster as other email messages that contain similar subject matter.

To understand the relationships among the documents in a case, reviewers analyze the key concepts in a mine. Concepts are nouns or noun phrases that describe a document, such as names, places, organizations, themes, and so on. Documents with similar concepts are clustered together. For information about reviewing mines, see Analyze document content using mines.

Reviewing large numbers of documents using concepts instead of keyword searches can be more efficient because reviewers can review documents without knowing which terms to search for.

For information about how to create a mine, see Add a mine.

Note: Administrators can grant group leaders administrative rights to mines on the Security > Administration page.

How mines work

Mines are created from documents that have been analyzed to determine which documents are related. During analysis, the application calculates the concepts in the documents using a combination of relative frequency and density of occurrence of the concept (how often the concept occurs). The analysis process calculates how accurately the clusters represent the document groupings, and redefines the groupings as necessary. For information about analyzing a document and extracting common concepts, see Index and analyze documents.

Comparing mines with the Map feature

Mines are similar to the Map feature, but they have the following differences.

Mines provide a macro view of a set of documents that are stored in a binder. The Mine Map can contain any number of documents.

The Map provides a micro view of a set of documents that is most often created through a search. You can code documents on the Map. The Map can display up to 10,000 documents at a time.

For information about the Map feature, see Review documents in the Map pane.