Digging up Resources - Fulltext search in BibSonomy

Background:
For a while now we were redesigning BibSonomy's full text search backend and now we decided that it is mature enough for mastering all of BibSonomy's search requests.

Our old backend was based on MySQL, using the MyISAM storage engine. But with all your Posts enlarging the search index each day, we nearly reached our server's capacity. Looking for a more efficient way of implementing full text search, we stumbled upon Lucene, a highly optimized search engine library, which is incorporated by the Apache Jakarta Project family since September 2001.

Now all of BibSonomy's full text search queries are handled by two redundant Lucene indexes, which are alternatively updated every 5 minutes.

Impact on your daily "BibSonomy-Experience":
First of all, switching to Lucene was an important step for preparing our servers to deal with even more users joining the BibSonomy community, as the search task now is separated and can be distributed among several independent machines. Secondly we hope to decrease BibSonomy's already small response time. But finally we now support more sophisticated search queries like "collaborative AND (b*marking OR ressource*)".

If you have any suggestion or encounter any problem, please contact us.

Happy Tagging!

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy Inside

As started in the last feature of the week we release this week additional information about BibSonomy which will help to integrate BibSonomy into other services like catalog systems of libraries. As discussed the former FOTW BibSonomy relies on different hash keys to find similar publications. The needed information to compute these keys is described here. The page includes a small demo and a java example implementation which is used in BibSonomy to compute the different hash keys. This implementation can be used to compute the same hash keys in other system. Together with the possibility to access the tag cloud of a publication by a hash via BibSonomy's API a nice integration and a community summary of a publication can be integrated into every system.

We think this is a first step for a tighter integration of Bibsonomy and libraries catalog systems or any other similar system.