"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

London Mathematical Society, De Morgan House, 57-58 Russell Square, London, WC1B 4HS.

Monday 15th August 2011

This is an introductory tutorial on Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search engine with a restful web interface. The event will be run by Sourcesense.

The tutorial will start by looking at basic searches, and go on to look at some more sophisticated queries - highlighting, spellchecking, faceting, and so on.

Following on, we will look at indexing. We will make use of the sample data within SOLR, and also a small Java application to index sample content from Wikipedia, which will be linked to from this page.

Prerequisites

You will need to have a recent Java installed (1.6 recommended, but >=1.5), and have downloaded the latest Solr release from here: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/

You should ensure that you can at least see the welcome page, instructions being:
* cd into the example directory in the package
* run java -jar start.jar
* Visit http://localhost:8983/solr/ in a browser. If you see a welcome message, your Solr works

No specific technology knowledge is required, although an interest in search would help! The querying part of this tutorial will mostly be typing URLs into a browser and reviewing the results. Indexing will require invoking a java jar file from the command line.

The zip file will be made available which contains some sample data exported from Wikipedia and pre-converted into the format expected by Solr. If you are curious about how this content was prepared, you will be able to download the zip file which includes the scripts (xsl, python and bash) that converted the Wikipedia export format into Solr format.

A free lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Tag for event

Please note, the tag for this event is:

#devcsi

You will be able to follow announcements about the event via twitter (as well as feeds from blogs and websites etc) by searching for the above tag. If you are new to twitter, please visit, http://www.twitter.com and create an account for yourself. We will be using technologies like this frequently, before, during and after the event.