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(Project) Search Revision

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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

3 Timeline

When

What

Winter 2022/23

Workshops on different aspects of search 

Summer 2023

Fundraising and Implementation for ILIAS 9

  • Some projects for underlying technology 

End of April 2025

Next batch of Feature Requests 

  • Some projects for underlying technology 
  • Some "Move to Kitchensink" projects 

Summer 2025

Fundraising and Implementation for ILIAS 11

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. 

Feature Request

Funding

Planned Release

Status

Using Maven to manage dependencies

HS Bremen 

9

Implemented for ILIAS 9

Improve Search Index with Tika

HS Bremen 

9

Implemented for ILIAS 9

Incremental Indexing of Exercises and Wikis

Uni Freiburg 

9

Implemented for ILIAS 9

Move Search Header to Kitchensink Filters

Removing LUI

10

Implemented for 10 

Move User Search Results to KS

requires funding

11

Jour Fixe ready

Moving the Advanced Search to KS

requires funding

11

almost Jour Fixe ready 

Search Results Presentation

requires funding

11

almost Jour Fixe ready 

Improve Search Slate in Metabar

requires funding

11

almost Jour Fixe ready 

Indexability of Object Types

requires funding

11

Overview article, implementation articles are derived individually 

Incremental Indexing Learning Modules and Container

requires funding

11

almost Jour Fixe ready

Filters and Search Results Object Data Structure

requires funding

11

needs conceptual work

Replace Current Search with Dependency to Query directly from PHP

n.a.

11

Jour Fixe ready 

Indices

n.a.

12

needs conceptual work

Stemming Requirements

n.a. 

12

needs conceptual work

Weighting in Search

n.a. 

12

needs conceptual work

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.

JourFixe, ILIAS [jourfixe], 21 FEB 2022: Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt] presented the project at the Big Projects Jour Fixe and answered questions.

  • Relevance for strategic ILIAS development: Improvement of a central service that rarely receives funding but is of hugh importance for using the system.
  • Plan for ILIAS 9: Workshops, first feature development (especially presentation)
  • Chance of realisation: Funding still unclear / dependent on workshop results
  • Dependencies: Dependence on KS / UI elements
  • Impact on other development activities: None

Statement Technical Board, 2022 Apr 6: We believe this project to involve a limited number of stakeholders. We see that the related feature requests mainly concern the search maintainer. Therefore, we are not certain how large the impact on other services or modules will be. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement, and we hope the project will achieve its goals. The Technical Board will assign no special priority to this project.

Statement UX/UI/A11y-Experts, 2022 Apr 6: A good search-functionality is vital for the accessibility of ILIAS. It needs to be made sure while improving the search-functionality that the search forms and results pages themselves are accessible.

Last edited: Yesterday, 13:33, Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]