User Behavior Insights (UBI) Spec 1.2.0 Notes

The specification for UBI has been updated! As we’ve been working on using UBI data to power calculating Implicit Judgements for OpenSearch, we’ve found that we had some inconsistencies.

The first one is that if you generate events from both Type Ahead and traditional Search then we want to distinguish the events generated from each of those as we would have two different sets of Implicit Judgements. We discovered that we didn’t’ have in the specification a formal way of distinguishing between the two, so now we’ve added a application attribute to Queries. It already existed for Events, and you could do some magic via the query_id to link back to the Query, but it was non obvious.

The second change was to adopt ISO 8601 formatting for all our timestamps. An example is "2018-11-13T20:20:39+00:00" We had in the OpenSearch UBI plugin the ability to use epoch time as well as the ISO 8601 format, but it wasn’t clear why. In 1.2.0 we use the ISO format in both Queries and Events. The OpenSearch UBI plugin is being updated to be 1.2.0 compliant and remove the epoch time format.

Notice that the timestamp is not required for Queries? That is because most UBI plugin authors will go ahead and fill that in as a default. However, if you wanted to replay historical data, or if you wanted to preserve the original timezone of the caller in your UBI data, then you would provide the timestamp data with the specific timezone yourself.