Solr powers library, government, and enterprise search systems in thousands of applications. This talk will showcase the various technologies and techniques used to build effective user search, browse, and find interfaces on top of Solr. Several of the full featured open-source library Solr front-ends will be shown, including Blacklight and VuFind. We’ll also demonstrate several front-end frameworks including:
• SolrJS - a JavaScript widget library
• Solr Flare - a Ruby on Rails plugin featuring Simile Timeline integration, Ajax suggest, and more
• Solritas - a built-in lightweight UI templating framework
Additionally, we’ll take a look under the covers of http://search.lucidimagination.com and see what makes it shine.
12. 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)
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13. Lucene
analysis inverted index
from "Taming Text" by Grant Ingersoll and Tom Morton
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14. Facets
• Sets, buckets
• (Un)common / similar metadata
• Useful for making sense of large datasets:
navigation, foraging, context, visualization
• By field, date ranges, or dynamic queries
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15. 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
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17. Solr Powered Library Systems
• VuFind (PHP)
• Kochief (Python)
• Blacklight (Ruby)
• and others
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18. • UVA radiation = blacklight
• libraries are much more than books
• opinionated
• Ruby on Rails: best choice for an
extensible user interface development
framework
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24. 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
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27. 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
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