Search Revision

This is a project page that bundles several feature wiki pages which belong to a larger development activity for the ILIAS component Search.

1 Aim of Project

The current implementation of the search gets revised. The new implementation is supposed to be more simple, to scale better and has a more attractive UI.
Serveral basic questions needs to be deliberated:

• Starting with inventorizing what should be indexed: Which object types and which parts of those object types. Consumer Code should preferably be able to register changes / new content that has not been indexed, thus allowing for incremental indexing. How should content types be recognized and extraction be done?
• The question of whether or not the search should deal with permission checks for searches by the anonymou user: Should they be applied after searching? Should the search be limited to specific parts of of the repository? Should this warrant a third and dedicated index?
• Stemming poses a challenge, it requires recognizing languages. We need to develop options to efficiently dealing with this without blowing performance.
• Determining and presenting Relevance needs to be revised. Should diferent contents have configurable weights for relevance?
•  How often should indices be build and how can this be perfomant?
• Are standard interfaces needed and which? Which Backend shoul be picked?
• How important is being able to run on a cluster? It is not important.

The Java Server for the Search also services the PDF generation. How can this be dealt with? 

2 Involved Maintainers and Stakeholders

• Maintainer and Development: Meyer, Stefan [smeyer]
• Project management and concepts: Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]
• Stakeholders
  • Univerity of Stuttgart / ILIAS BW
  • HS Bremen 
  • Limo project 

3 Timeline

4 Related Feature Requests and Status

After a phase of devising concepts there are two strands to this project: Revision of presentation of search to users and revision of underlying search technology. 

5 General Discussion

Please discuss specific questions of feature requests on the related feature wiki pages. This discussion section is only for a general discussion of the project and its realisation.