solr flair: search user interfaces powered by apache solr
DESCRIPTION
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 frameworkAdditionally, we’ll take a look under the covers of http://search.lucidimagination.com and see what makes it shine.TRANSCRIPT
patacriticism.org
"Poets are the unacknowledged engineers of the world"- Monna Grémejc
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Patacritical Projects
• RoSe: Rossetti Searchrossettiarchive.org
• Collex: Collect/Exhibitcollex.org
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serendipity
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Rossetti Archive
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/rose/?query=%2Bpresentation+%2B%28archivetype%3Arap%29
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NINES on Collex
http://www.nines.org/search/saved?user=erikhatcher&name=wombat
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NINES tag cloud
http://www.nines.org/tags
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Finding the Celtic on Collex
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/collex/8
Simile Timeline
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/timeline/show9
Geographic
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/atlas/show10
Graphs
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/graph/show11
Solr
DB
Data
Search Results
DocumentDocumentDocuments
Solr
• Search server, powered by Lucene
• Indexing/searching via HTTP, responses in XML, Ruby, PHP, Python, XSLT, etc
• Faceting
• Scalability: caching, replication, distributed search
• Integrates: spell checking, highlighting, more-like-this, clustering, rich document indexing, data import handling (RDBMS, and more)
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Lucene
inverted index
from "Taming Text" by Grant Ingersoll and Tom Morton
analysis
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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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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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Tang on Flare
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Solr Powered Library Systems
• VuFind (PHP)
• Kochief (Python)
• Blacklight (Ruby)
• and others
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• 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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Blacklight @ UVa
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Blacklight @ Stanford
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Blacklight @ AgNIC
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SolrJS
• jQuery-based interactions with Solr
• Query navigation state management and widgets
• Evolving rapidly: Drupal contributed improvements (see http://drupal.org/project/solrjs) coming soon
• Live example: http://solrjs.solrstuff.org/
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SolrJS Example
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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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Lucene in Action on Solritas
coming soon: lucenebook.com25
LucidFind
http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/?q=user+interface
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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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Shout Out
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