[iks-community] Semantic search engine kickoff

[Bertrand Delacretaz]

Hi,

Time has flown and I haven't kicked off the semantic search engine
disussions yet, following up on our discussions at the Salzburg IKS
meeting.

I'll be mostly offline next week, but I wanted to at least start the
discussion here, so that we can go forward.

The idea is to start from the
http://www.interactive-knowledge.org/content/iks-search-engine-proposal,
and prototype something that we can play with quickly.

The first use case that I'd like us to implement is like:

0. Select a website that contains interesting data in microformats and/or RDFa
1. Add the homepage URL to the search engine crawler config
2. Search engine crawls website, indexes full text and structured data
extracted from microformats and/or RDFa
3. Simple UI allows for searching that data, both full-text and structured
4. Structured data should be exportable in standard formats for
further processing with semantic tools

If anyone knows of existing software that would allow us to set this
up with no or minimal programming work that would be cool (I don't). I
assume we can host that on IKS servers, though details of that have to
be finalized.

If there's no existing software that does that, lets see what are the
minimal steps that allow us to implement this, just as a first
prototype that can be used as a basis for creating the next one. I'd
lean towards Lucene, Solr or Jackrabbit as those are the things that I
know best in this area, but this is all open.

Comments are welcome, of course!

-Bertrand (mostly offline until next Thursday July 2nd)