Topics are a feature of IBM SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services that provide you with a method for classifying the survey assets (see Survey assets in a UNICOM Intelligence Question Repository) in the repository. For example, you might want to classify survey assets by their type, such as Demographics, or by the mode in which the generated questionnaire will be used, such as Paper. You can define a topic structure that looks much like a folder structure, that is, topics can contain other topics, or subtopics. However, topics differ from folders in that you can list a survey asset under more than one topic.

You can browse the topic hierarchy you have created (see Find Existing Survey Asset). A survey asset should be listed under all the topics that have been assigned to a particular survey asset.

Security on topics is not supported. Therefore, a user who has been assigned the Define Topics action in IBM SPSS Collaboration and Deployment Services can administer all topics in the repository. In addition, your topic names are visible to all users of the repository, which might include users of non-repository applications. For these reasons, do not include sensitive information in topic names, and consider whether you should setup a dedicated repository for your UNICOM Intelligence Question Repository.

Add, update, and delete topics using IBM SPSS Deployment Manager. For more information, see “Working with Topics” in the IBM SPSS Deployment Manager User's Guide.

Additional topics can be added to the root topic. When storing questions to the Question Repository through the UNICOM Intelligence Author or UNICOM Intelligence Professional applications, you can select any of the topics that are located underneath the root topic that is defined in the LibraryTopicRoot property: see Configuring multiple question repositories. When a topic is not specified, the asset is stored with the topic name that is defined in the DefaultTopic property (see Configuring multiple question repositories). A topic hierarchy can be defined as long as the top-most topic matches the name in the LibraryTopicRoot property (see Configuring multiple question repositories).

You typically assign topics to survey assets, or unassign topics from survey assets, by using the Store Survey Asset into Repository wizard (see Store Survey Asset into Repository Wizard). However, you can also use IBM SPSS Deployment Manager to carry out these tasks. For more information, see “Working with Topics” in the IBM SPSS Deployment Manager User's Guide.