<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif">Dear Diva:</DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif">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.</DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif">You might find it interesting that OSGrid is controlled from a series of servers at 15 Bayside near the corner of Culver and Alton.</DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif">Charles<BR><BR></DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: times new roman, new york, times, serif">----- Original Message ----<BR>From: Diva Canto <diva@metaverseink.com><BR>To: opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de<BR>Sent: Monday, February 4, 2008 3:42:26 PM<BR>Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Search server DB schema<BR><BR>Hello opensim-developers,<BR><BR>First of all, thanks for putting opensim together, this is what we all <BR>needed! I just signed up for this list, so apologies if my comments are <BR>out of place. I did set up my own OpenSim, and it's great! (in spite of <BR>all the fights i've been having with mono on Mac, but that's another thread)<BR><BR>Over the past 10 months or so, a colleague and I have developed an <BR>independent search engine for LL's SL, which can be accessed here: <BR><A href="http://slbrowser.com/" target=_blank>http://slbrowser.com</A> The engine does not require special access to grid <BR>databases, it uses bots to collect inworld
information, one sim at a <BR>time. We use libsecondlife. It has been working continuously for the <BR>past 6 months; we crawl the grid twice a week with only 14 bots, and <BR>have been able to find appropriate heuristics for many things.<BR><BR>In general search can be looked at in two ways, and these are *not* <BR>incompatible: it can be a basic administrative function -- you want to <BR>know the data you serve; or it can be a basic user function -- you want <BR>people to be able find things. The first type of search is really <BR>simple: stick a DB, and you've solved it. This works fairly well for <BR>small amounts of data, and for data that is fairly constrained. The <BR>second type of search is a lot more powerful, but it's not so simple, <BR>because you want to rank the huge amount of results in a semantically <BR>meaningful way. With SLBrowser, we've followed the latter. Crawling the <BR>live sims gives us a lot of useful aggregate information
that we use to <BR>experiment with ranking in much more interesting ways. We don't use a <BR>relational DB on the backend, we use Lucene.<BR><BR>I would hate that OpenSim follows Linden Lab's steps with search without <BR>taking advantage of the lessons that even they already learned -- that <BR>relational schemas are not appropriate for modern information retrieval. <BR>I'll be happy to help setting up this basic search service with Lucene, <BR>rather than with a relational DB. Lucene is, essentially, a highly <BR>optimized database for text search. For example, issues like this<BR>" I'm going to assume name == varchar(63) and description == <BR>varchar(127), but it might be easier to just set everything to <BR>varchar(255) for flexibility."<BR>are a non-problem in Lucene -- you can use as little or as much text as <BR>you want in a field, you don't need to hard-code that.<BR><BR>Can I help with plugging a Lucene-based search for OpenSim, please? (the
<BR>thought of having a relational DB serving text search makes me shiver :-)<BR>I've never participated in an Open Source project as such, so I'm not <BR>sure how the process is. I did contribute to OS projects before -- <BR><A href="http://aspectj.org/" target=_blank>aspectj.org</A>, co-founder, and more recently contributed plugins to XWiki <BR>with one of my students.<BR><BR>Let me know.<BR><BR>Crista Lopes / Diva Canto<BR>School of Information and Computer Sciences<BR>University of California, Irvine<BR><BR><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Opensim-dev mailing list<BR><A href="mailto:Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de" ymailto="mailto:Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de">Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de</A><BR><A href="https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev" target=_blank>https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev</A><BR></DIV>
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