[Opensim-dev] OpenSim search

Thu Feb 7 18:29:02 UTC 2008

I'll weigh in here and say that I think Diva's thoughts appear sound to me and I would like to encourage them and offer a friendly environment to test them on OSGrid as they come together.

Charles

----- Original Message ----
From: Diva Canto <diva at metaverseink.com>
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Sent: Thursday, February 7, 2008 9:01:05 AM
Subject: [Opensim-dev] OpenSim search

Hi all,

I've been spending some time studying the project, to see how exactly I 
can contribute towards enabling search engines in OpenSims/Grids. I have 
a more concrete plan now that I'd like to share with you, and ask 
whether this is something you think it's worth pursuing or not. If not, 
then, well, never mind, it's just a plan! :-) If you think it's worth 
pursuing, after getting your comments I will proceed to coding this 
weekend, and when I'm done I'll submit my code as a patch for your 
assessment and consideration. The patch involved in this is relatively 
independent of everything that already exists, it would simply be 
another server command that doesn't interfere with the existing ones. 
Here's the details.

The very basic for a search engine to exist is the data that lives on 
the sims. (I'll talk more about which data and data access control in 
the next paragraph, but let's ignore that in this paragraph.) As such, 
that data has to be exposed for collection. The right way to do this is 
to generate an XML file representing the information on the sims, namely 
parcel and object information. This file can then be served by the sim 
via, for example, http. So, a possible interface to data collection 
services might be as simple as this: tagus.ics.uci.edu/OpenSim Test.xml. 
My concrete proposal as a first step is to implement a command that 
generates this XML file, possibly called xml-snapshot.

Unlike the existing save/load commands, whose purpose is admin backups 
and data ports, this external exposure doesn't need so many details and 
must be aware of exposure controls.
- Less details: children prims in objects are irrelevant -- only the 
root prims matter.
- Exposure control: the viewer's checkbox "Show in search" is a good 
indicator of users intensions towards  external exposure. (In fact, that 
button should really be called "Expose externally"). Only objects and 
parcels that have that marked should be exposed.

Additionally to users intensions, there can be two more layers of 
control, one at the sim admin level, and one at the grid admin level.
- At the sim level, each sim admin should have the power to override the 
users checkboxes. Specifically, if sim admins decide that nothing in the 
sim should be exposed then the xml-snapshot for those sims is a no-op.
- At the grid level, each grid operator should have the power to decide 
whether to externally serve common assets, such as textures, or not. 
More importanly, the grid operator should also be able to instruct the 
sims on that grid that they should not serve the XML file to external 
data collectors, only to data collectors that are "authorized" by the grid.

These controls enable a variety of grids, from very open to completely 
closed, homogeneous, heterogeneous, and everything in between.
Once this external data exposure is in place, data collection components 
(search engines and others) can do their thing.

Note that Linden Lab has recently moved from being a closed grid to 
being open, with respect to sim and user data. Unfortunately, they 
decided to use HTML as data representation...duh.

Additionally to the xml-snapshot command, I can volunteer to implement a 
basic Lucene-based search engine that OpenSim grid operators can run on 
their own grids. This is independent of any other search engines, and is 
particularly useful in grids that are closed to the outside. The 
argument here is that Lucene-based text search  is 100x better than 
relational queries, under all aspects I can think of -- run-time 
performance, sim/grid load, component coupling, and relevance of search 
results.

Note that some parts of the search problem can still be served in the 
traditional way. Specifically, user search seems like a really simple 
thing to do with SQL, it's not like there are many Diva Canto's on the 
grid... So the idea of a SQL-based search service for certain kinds of 
data is not incompatible with what I'm proposing.

I'll wait for your comments, and, as I said, if you think this is not 
worth pursuing, I'll go away :-)
Probably won't be able to reply until later tonight.

Diva

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