Solr Flair
Search 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 Search
rossettiarchive.org
• Collex: Collect/Exhibit
collex.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
•
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)

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 data
http://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