Our term project for Information Retrieval course — web service providing information about church location and mass times with focus on structuring crawled data, search and ranking.

1. MassNow
intelligent church locator
Jakub Žitný, Thanduxolo Zwane

2. Outline
● Goal
● Available technologies
○ Indexing and Search in real life
■ Elasticsearch, Solr, NoSQL dbs
○ Mobile IR
● Our solution
● Demo
● Future
2/18

3. Goal (1)
The “problem”
● one of the reasons people don’t go to church when they
travel is not knowing about the location of nearby
churches
● there is plenty of apps for searching
○ hotels
○ restaurants
○ gas stations
3/18

4. Goal (2)
The plan
● a similar service for browsing and searching masses,
churches and religious institutions
● ability to find the closest and earliest masses
● api, website and android app
*mass is the ‘session’ in church that people visit on Sundays (and any other day)
4/18

5. ● data
● API
○ FAST
○ SMART
● simple and easy-to-use apps for users
○ web
○ android
What do we need?
5/18

6. Available technologies (1)
Data
● custom crawlers to retrieve data from available
websites into structured form in database instead of
manual collection of information
● Database
○ SQL or NoSQL or XML or files?
● Indexing and search
○ Solr vs. Elasticsearch
6/18

7. Available technologies (2)
API
● REST/SOAP/Other?
● works well with Solr/Elasticsearch
=> CouchDB + Elasicsearch
● fast, scalable NoSQL
● built-in REST API!
● Elasticsearch integration
7/18

8. Available technologies (3)
Website
● traditional PHP/Java/Python/Ruby/ASP.NET
● JavaScript
○ client side + server side (node.js)
○ goes very well with REST and JSON
○ express.js
○ ability to write everything we need 8/18

9. Available technologies (4)
Android
● Google Maps API
● mobile smart search
○ SQLite
○ TouchDB
○ Couchbase Lite
○ or our own custom solution? 9/18

10. Our solution
and many others:
● elasticsearch-HQ, BigDesk, Kibana
● eventbus, robospice, retrofit, okhttp, butterknife
● node.js, express.js, nano, elasticsearch-js, jade-lang
● twitter bootstrap
10/18

11. Demo - API
11/18
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12. Demo - API #

13. Demo - API #

14. Demo - app

15. Demo - app

16. Demo - web #

17. Future
● design
● better smart search
● iOS, Windows Phone
● more data
● even more data
● even more design
● rule the world 17/18

18. 謝謝你們