[Opensim-dev] OpenSim search

Fri Apr 4 03:45:55 UTC 2008

I feel pretty good at all that Diva and others have done. It appears that a lot of thought has gone into enough configuration to allow the different use cases. So, I would like to encourage this work and commend Diva, KMeisthax and others.

Charles

----- Original Message ----
From: Diva Canto <diva at metaverseink.com>
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Cc: William Cook <wcook at cs.utexas.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2008 6:22:53 PM
Subject: [Opensim-dev] OpenSim search

Dear opensim-devs,

kmeisthax (David Wendt) and I have been working on supporting search for 
OpenSims. It is my pleasure to announce that we have the very first 
implementation working! Very extremely alpha...
Initial deployment has been done in a few regions in OSGrid, with the 
time and generosity of my close collaborators here at UCI, Sean 
Hennessee and John Ward, and, of course, Charles Krinke from OSGrid.
Here is a search interface:

http://metaverseink.com/preview-1.1.html
(select OpenSims)
WARNINGS:
(1) not a lot of words there yet; try "wright plaza" or "irvine"
(2) most links don't work, especially the all-important Map/Go ;-)

Let me explain what this is all about, and how you can try it in your 
own regions.

Fundamentally, this is about finding 3D spaces through text search. The 
search problem can be seen in many lights. It can be seen as a grid 
problem, or as a metaverse problem, and these are not contradictory. For 
grids that implement the walled-garden model of virtual worlds 
(intranets and not only), search is something that they provide 
internally, but no data is exposed to the outside. For grids that are 
open, the regions' data is exposed to the world so that 3rd parties can 
provide value-added services, such as search. The way we've done it, we 
take no sides on the issue; it's up to the grid operators, region 
administrators, and users to decide.

So, down to the technical aspects. There are two independent parts to this:

A) On the side of OpenSim, this involves exposing regions' data every so 
often in a format that is appropriate for data collection services to 
consume. We implemented a DataSnapshot module, in the true spirit of 
modularity in OpenSim. Our module is fairly independent of the rest of 
the code, it doesn't even need to be compiled together, and we haven't 
bugged you about adding this code to the main distribution -- which we 
hope will happen, but it's not necessary. You can try it right now by 
using the corresponding dll -- instructions here: 
http://metaverseink.com/resources/
This module does three things: 1) it periodically generates xml 
representations of the searchable data of the regions; 2) it notifies 
data services of the existence of the simulator; and 3) it serves 
requests for giving out the xml files. The workings of the module are 
ruled by a few configuration settings in OpenSim.ini. The source code of 
the DataSnapshot module is hosted on my svn server at UCI. We'll gladly 
give it out to the OpenSim project, or we can keep it here. Whatever you 
think is best.

B) Once these snapshots, and their serving, are in place it's up to data 
collection services to come and get them. This part I did by myself, 
wearing my Metaverse Ink hat -- it was just easier to reuse what we 
already have for indexing SL. That's what you see in that web 
interface.  Note, however, that Metaverse Ink is not the only data 
collection service possible. Anyone can develop their own data 
collection service for search or something else. Also, I plan to develop 
a grid-wide search engine based on the same concepts, that closed grids 
can use. That component will be open sourced and given to the OpenSim 
project.

About data exposure control:

This snapshot module only exposes data that is marked "Show in search". 
(detail: right now, it only exposes parcel information; I need to have 
conversation with the libsl folks about the objects' "Show in search" 
property). So, public exposure is ultimately controlled by the users. 
Region admins also have control of data exposure by running the 
DataSnapshot module or not. Finally grid operators also have control by 
allowing the regions to run the DataSnapshot module or not, and to give 
out the data to external data services or not (we haven't implemented 
this region-grid protocol yet, but it's perfectly doable, if people want 
it).

There's tons more! But this email is already too long, so I leave it at 
that. Bottom line: please check
http://metaverseink.com/preview-1.1.html
and then, if you want to see your regions there, follow the instructions 
here:
http://metaverseink.com/resources/
(Note that the updates are not instantaneous. It may take a while... 
especially if the engine gets stuck while I'm sleeping :-)

My kudos to the original architects of OpenSim for establishing this 
wonderful plugin architecture!

Comments / suggestions / ... very welcome!

Crista / Diva

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