A derived attribute is an attribute created entirely within the EasyAsk environment that does not exist in your source product catalog. To the website it appears just like an attribute that has come from the product catalog, but it is created by your business users without having to touch the catalog.
Derived attributes have a name and a set of values, for example “Color Family” and “Red”, “Blue”, “Green”, etc. Each value has a rule associated with it that determines which products have this attribute value. For example, the rule for “Red” may be “product name contains ‘red’ or ‘cherry’ or ‘wine’ or ‘cerise’ “. EasyAsk pre‐processes these rules to create internal lists of matching products in its high speed search indexes.
The ability to create new attributes without any IT involvement means that merchandisers can quickly create new ways to shop for their customers.
Derived attribute value names also become searchable, so in the color family example above, if a user searches for “red shoes” they will find shoes described as “red”, “cherry”, “wine” and “cerise”.
Derived attributes can be defined for merchandising use only, meaning they will not appear as search filters. This allows merchandisers to use derived attributes to make arbitrary product grouping, perhaps for landing pages, campaigns, etc.