Solr Flair
Search User Interfaces Powered by Apache Solr
Erik Hatcher
erik.hatcher@lucidimagination.com
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patacriticism.org
"Poets are the unacknowledged engineers of the world"
- Monna Grémejc
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Patacritical Projects
• RoSe: Rossetti Search
rossettiarchive.org
• Collex: Collect/Exhibit
collex.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/
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Simile Timeline
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/timeline/show
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Geographic
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/atlas/show
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Graphs
http://celtic.ibiblio.org/graph/show
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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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Lucene
analysis inverted index
from "Taming Text" by Grant Ingersoll and Tom Morton
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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.com
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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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