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(Projekt Search Revision ILIAS 12
Page Overview
[Hide]This is a project page that bundles several feature wiki pages which belong to a larger development activity for the ILIAS component Search. (Projekt Search Revision ILIAS 12
1 Aim of Project
The current implementation of the search gets revised. The new implementation is supposed to be more stable / maintainable, to scale better and has a simpler, more attractive UI.
Serveral basic questions needs to be deliberated:
- We inventorized what should be indexed: Feature Wiki: Indexability of 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
- Helmut Schmidt Universität / Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg
- HS Bremen
- University Hannover
3 Timeline
When | What |
|---|---|
Spring 2026 | Workshops, Feature Requests, Fundraising |
Summer 2026 or later | Implementation for ILIAS 12 |
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.
4.1 To be implemented for 12
Feature Request | Funding | Planned Release | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Contracted by University Hannover | 12 | Accepted for Trunk | |
Improve Maintainability: Only Essential Features for Direct Search | requires funding | 12 | Accepted for Trunk |
4.2 Backlog
Feature Request | Funding | Planned Release | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
requires funding | 11 | almost Jour Fixe ready | |
requires funding | 11 | Overview article, implementation articles are derived individually | |
requires funding | 11 | almost Jour Fixe ready | |
requires funding | 12 | Jour Fixe ready | |
Replace Current Search with Dependency to Query directly from PHP | n.a. | 12 | Jour Fixe ready |
requires funding | 12 | needs conceptual work | |
n.a. | 12 | needs conceptual work | |
n.a. | 12 | needs conceptual work | |
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: 31. Oct 2025, 14:27, Tödt, Alexandra [atoedt]