<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Interesting to hear OSGrid servers are nearby. I live in Fullerton.<div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Blessings,</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Scott</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><a href="http://www.scottnorman.com">www.scottnorman.com</a></font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px"><font face="Times" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Times; font-family: Times; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; ">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</span></span></font></p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></div></span> </div><br><div><div>On Feb 5, 2008, at 10:11 AM, Charles Krinke wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div><div style="font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Dear Diva:</div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> </div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">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><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> </div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">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><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> </div><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Charles<br><br></div><div style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">----- Original Message ----<br>From: Diva Canto <<a href="mailto:diva@metaverseink.com">diva@metaverseink.com</a>><br>To:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="mailto:opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de">opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de</a><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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>needed! I just signed up for this list, so apologies if my comments are<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>out of place. I did set up my own OpenSim, and it's great! (in spite of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>independent search engine for LL's SL, which can be accessed here:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br><a href="http://slbrowser.com/" target="_blank">http://slbrowser.com</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The engine does not require special access to grid<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>databases, it uses bots to collect inworld information, one sim at a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>time. We use libsecondlife. It has been working continuously for the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>past 6 months; we crawl the grid twice a week with only 14 bots, and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><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*<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>incompatible: it can be a basic administrative function -- you want to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>know the data you serve; or it can be a basic user function -- you want<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>people to be able find things. The first type of search is really<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>simple: stick a DB, and you've solved it. This works fairly well for<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>small amounts of data, and for data that is fairly constrained. The<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>second type of search is a lot more powerful, but it's not so simple,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>because you want to rank the huge amount of results in a semantically<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>meaningful way. With SLBrowser, we've followed the latter. Crawling the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>live sims gives us a lot of useful aggregate information that we use to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>experiment with ranking in much more interesting ways. We don't use a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>relational DB on the backend, we use Lucene.<br><br>I would hate that OpenSim follows Linden Lab's steps with search without<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>taking advantage of the lessons that even they already learned -- that<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>relational schemas are not appropriate for modern information retrieval.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>I'll be happy to help setting up this basic search service with Lucene,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>rather than with a relational DB. Lucene is, essentially, a highly<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>optimized database for text search. For example, issues like this<br>" I'm going to assume name == varchar(63) and description ==<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>varchar(127), but it might be easier to just set everything to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>varchar(255) for flexibility."<br>are a non-problem in Lucene -- you can use as little or as much text as<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><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<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>sure how the process is. I did contribute to OS projects before --<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br><a href="http://aspectj.org/" target="_blank">aspectj.org</a>, co-founder, and more recently contributed plugins to XWiki<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><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><div style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: courier, monaco, monospace, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>Opensim-dev mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de">Opensim-dev@lists.berlios.de</a><br><a href="https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev">https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev</a><br></div></span></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>