Solr Flair: Search User Interfaces Powered by Apache Solr (ApacheCon US 2009, Lucene Meetup)

Solr FlairSearch User Interfaces Powered by Apache Solr

Erik Hatcher

erik.hatcher@lucidimagination.com

http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/LuceneAtApacheConUs2009

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

patacriticism.org

"Poets are the unacknowledged engineers of the world"- Monna Grémejc

Patacritical Projects

• RoSe: Rossetti Searchrossettiarchive.org

• Collex: Collect/Exhibitcollex.org

serendipity

Rossetti Archive

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

NINES on Collex

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

NINES tag cloud

http://www.nines.org/tags

Finding the Celtic on Collex

http://celtic.ibiblio.org/collex/

Simile Timeline

http://celtic.ibiblio.org/timeline/show

Geographic

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

Graphs

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

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)

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

Tang on Flare

• UVA radiation = blacklight

• libraries are much more than books

• opinionated

• Ruby on Rails: best choice for an extensible user interface development framework

Blacklight @ UVa

Blacklight @ Stanford

Blacklight @ AgNIC

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 datahttp://solrjs.solrstuff.org/

SolrJS Example

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

Lucene in Action on Solritas

coming soon: lucenebook.com

LucidFind

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

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