Deprecated. This material represents early efforts and may be of interest to historians. It doe not describe current VIVO efforts.
Deprecated. This material represents early efforts and may be of interest to historians. It doe not describe current VIVO efforts.
VIVO uses the Solr search engine in two ways:
Like many web sites, VIVO includes a search box on every page. The person using VIVO can type a search term, and see the results. This search is conducted by Solr, and the results are formatted and displayed by VIVO.
Solr allows for a "faceted" search, and VIVO displays the facets on the right side of the results page. These allow the user to filter the search results, showing only entries for people, or for organizations, etc.
VIVO is based around an RDF triple-store, which holds all of its data. However, there are some tasks that a search engine can do much more quickly than a triple-store. Some of the fields in the Solr search index were put there specifically to help with these tasks.
For example, the browse area on the home page shows how many individuals VIVO holds for each class group.
VIVO could produce this data by issuing a SPARQL query against its data model. However, this would take several seconds for a large site, and we do not want the user to wait that long to see the home page. To avoid this delay, the class group of each individual is stored in the Solr record for that individual. Solr can count these fields very quickly, so VIVO issues a Solr query against the index, and displays the results on the home page.
Record counts on VIVO's index pages are obtained using the same type of Solr query.
A rebuild is done on the side, then replaces the previous index, and Solr switches to the rebuilt one.
(Recap: look through all of the steps with Mark Ludwig)