[iks-community] Semantic search engine kickoff

[Axel Polleres]

Hi all,

first of all kindest apologies for the late response to [1]
We have/had to sort out things since the main developer of the SWSE
search engine and architecture, Andreas Harth, moved to the AIFB, Uni
Karlsruhe, and in the course of the move, we had some delays in
answering the questions of what setup we could provide.

The current, but inofficial, status of SWSE/yars2 is the following:
   * we are working on a licensing model for the software
   * as a short-term goal we are working on making at least a
     non-commercial/academic binary available
     (discussions on whether/how we'll open source the system are  
ongoing)
   * if needed we could discuss whether/how we can make binaries  
available
     for project use within IKS for testing purposes

What we can offer out-of-the box without additional resources is:
    * a single server setup hosted on one of our servers
    * periodical crawls of a provided list of CMS URIs of interest
      [as long as we are overall < 50M statements, <100K documents
       the resources we could free easily at the moment should be  
sufficient]
    * a yars2 instance for the crawled data, including
      * a SPARQL endpoint on top of the yars2 index
      * an instance of the current SWSE user interface [2] on top of the
        yars2 index

Additional notes:
    - The update frequency of the index mainly depends on the number of
statements we have to parse, clean and process.

We'd hope that is sufficient for the current project needs, if not,
please let us know in what ranges your requirements would be.
Without additional resources we are not capable of offering
a more advanced setup of SWSE/yars2 short term (could include
distributed index build, distributed yars2 instances, distributed
SPARQL processing, reasoning [4] on the crawled data, but we'd
suggest to get things going small and then see where we'd get from  
there.

Such a setup could be the starting point for a semantic search engine  
for IKS
and on top of that demonstrate the feasibility of a federated CMS
infrastructure as we sketch it in [3, Section 5.2],  so we'd be very  
excited
about getting this going in collaboration with IKS and then explore
further opportunities jointly!

Best,
Axel, Juergen, Aidan

[1] http://lists.iks-project.eu/pipermail/iks-community/2009-July/000028.html
[2] http://swse.deri.org/
[3] Stéphane Corlosquet, Renaud Delbru, Tim Clark, Axel Polleres, and  
Stefan Decker. Produce and consume linked data with drupal! In  
Proceedings of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC  
2009), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Washington DC, USA, October  
2009. Available at http://www.polleres.net/publications/corl-etal-2009iswc.pdf
[4] Aidan Hogan, Andreas Harth, and Axel Polleres. Scalable  
authoritative owl reasoning for the web. International Journal on  
Semantic Web and Information Systems, 5(2), 2009. Available at http://www.deri.ie/fileadmin/documents/DERI-TR-2009-04-21.pdf

-- 
Dr. Axel Polleres
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland,  
Galway
email: axel.polleres at deri.org  url: http://www.polleres.net/