[Opensim-dev] Search server DB schema

[Scott T. Norman]

Interesting to hear OSGrid servers are nearby. I live in Fullerton.

Blessings,

Scott
www.scottnorman.com

God's covenant of revival fire has fallen upon Orange County,  
California, so that the Church of Orange County will become one and  
bring healing, salvation, and redemption to the county, and to take  
part in the harvest of one billion plus souls into the Kingdom of God.  
- Scott Norman



On Feb 5, 2008, at 10:11 AM, Charles Krinke wrote:

> Dear Diva:
>
> I like your ideas and they seem worth pursuing. Interesting enough,  
> I am in Irvine also and just down the street from you. Perhaps we  
> will meet and discuss this in person sometime.
>
> You might find it interesting that OSGrid is controlled from a  
> series of servers at 15 Bayside near the corner of Culver and Alton.
>
> Charles
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Diva Canto <diva at metaverseink.com>
> To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> Sent: Monday, February 4, 2008 3:42:26 PM
> Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Search server DB schema
>
> Hello opensim-developers,
>
> First of all, thanks for putting opensim together, this is what we all
> needed! I just signed up for this list, so apologies if my comments  
> are
> out of place. I did set up my own OpenSim, and it's great! (in spite  
> of
> all the fights i've been having with mono on Mac, but that's another  
> thread)
>
> Over the past 10 months or so, a colleague and I have developed an
> independent search engine for LL's SL, which can be accessed here:
> http://slbrowser.com The engine does not require special access to  
> grid
> databases, it uses bots to collect inworld information, one sim at a
> time. We use libsecondlife. It has been working continuously for the
> past 6 months; we crawl the grid twice a week with only 14 bots, and
> have been able to find appropriate heuristics for many things.
>
> In general search can be looked at in two ways, and these are *not*
> incompatible: it can be a basic administrative function -- you want to
> know the data you serve; or it can be a basic user function -- you  
> want
> people to be able find things. The first type of search is really
> simple: stick a DB, and you've solved it. This works fairly well for
> small amounts of data, and for data that is fairly constrained. The
> second type of search is a lot more powerful, but it's not so simple,
> because you want to rank the huge amount of results in a semantically
> meaningful way. With SLBrowser, we've followed the latter. Crawling  
> the
> live sims gives us a lot of useful aggregate information that we use  
> to
> experiment with ranking in much more interesting ways. We don't use a
> relational DB on the backend, we use Lucene.
>
> I would hate that OpenSim follows Linden Lab's steps with search  
> without
> taking advantage of the lessons that even they already learned -- that
> relational schemas are not appropriate for modern information  
> retrieval.
> I'll be happy to help setting up this basic search service with  
> Lucene,
> rather than with a relational DB. Lucene is, essentially, a highly
> optimized database for text search. For example, issues like this
> " I'm going to assume name == varchar(63) and description ==
> varchar(127), but it might be easier to just set everything to
> varchar(255) for flexibility."
> are a non-problem in Lucene -- you can use as little or as much text  
> as
> you want in a field, you don't need to hard-code that.
>
> Can I help with plugging a Lucene-based search for OpenSim, please?  
> (the
> thought of having a relational DB serving text search makes me  
> shiver :-)
> I've never participated in an Open Source project as such, so I'm not
> sure how the process is. I did contribute to OS projects before --
> aspectj.org, co-founder, and more recently contributed plugins to  
> XWiki
> with one of my students.
>
> Let me know.
>
> Crista Lopes / Diva Canto
> School of Information and Computer Sciences
> University of California, Irvine
>
>
>
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