Solr powers library, government, and enterprise search systems in thousands of applications. This talk showcases various technologies and techniques used to build effective user search, browse, and find interfaces on top of Solr.

1. Solr Flair
Search User Interfaces Powered by Apache Solr
Erik Hatcher
erik.hatcher@lucidimagination.com
http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/
LuceneAtApacheConUs2009

2. My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St._Vincent_Millay

3. patacriticism.org
"Poets are the unacknowledged engineers of the world"
- Monna Grémejc

4. Patacritical Projects
• RoSe: Rossetti Search
rossettiarchive.org
• Collex: Collect/Exhibit
collex.org

5. serendipity

6. Rossetti Archive
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/rose/?query=%2Bpresentation+%2B%28archivetype%3Arap%29

7. NINES on Collex
http://www.nines.org/search/saved?user=erikhatcher&name=wombat

8. NINES tag cloud
http://www.nines.org/tags

9. Finding the Celtic on Collex
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/collex/

10. Simile Timeline
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/timeline/show

11. Geographic
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/atlas/show

12. Graphs
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/graph/show

13. Solr
•
Data
Search server, powered by Lucene DB
•
Document
Document
Indexing/searching via HTTP, responses Documents
in XML, Ruby, PHP, Python, XSLT, etc
• Faceting
Solr
• Scalability: caching, replication,
distributed search
• Integrates: spell checking, highlighting, Search Results
more-like-this, clustering, rich document
indexing, data import handling (RDBMS,
and more)

14. Solr Flare
• Ruby on Rails plugin
• facet field detection, autosuggest, saved
search, inverted facets, pie charts, Simile
Timeline and Exhibit integration
• Useful for rapid prototyping
• See Flare's big brother, Blacklight, for
production quality

15. Tang on Flare

16. • UVA radiation = blacklight
• libraries are much more than books
• opinionated
• Ruby on Rails: best choice for an
extensible user interface development
framework

17. Blacklight @ UVa

18. Blacklight @ Stanford

19. Blacklight @ AgNIC

20. AJAX-Solr
• Forked and improved from the now deprecated
SolrJS
• JavaScript framework agnostic (jQuery, prototype,
Dojo, etc)
• Query navigation state management and widgets
• http://github.com/evolvingweb/AJAX-Solr
• Example of SolrJS on Reuters data
http://solrjs.solrstuff.org/

21. SolrJS Example

22. Solritas
• celeritas: swiftness, speed (Latin), origin of
the symbol "c" for the speed of light
• solritas:Velocity template rendering of Solr
responses
• Useful for rapid prototyping and more

23. Lucene in Action on Solritas
coming soon: lucenebook.com

24. LucidFind
http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/?q=user+interface

25. Food for thought
• The interface is the application
• URLs are UI too!
• Facets aren't just for lists (with counts)
• be creative: clouds, maps, graphs, etc...
• entice users to forage and browse,
facilitate serendipitous discovery