Tag: Sphinx

How Staff Directory Search Works

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Open Data, Projects

I’ve had a couple of people ask how my lunchtime project today actually works behind the scenes, so here’s the lowdown in easily-digestible speak. I should point out that I am relying heavily on two frameworks which we’ve already built at Lincoln. These are Nucleus – our heavy-lifting data platform – and the Common Web Design – our web design and application framework. These two gave me a massive head-start by already doing all of the hard work such as extracting data from our directory and making the whole thing look great. Now, on with technology.

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Things I did on my lunch break.

Nick Jackson / / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

Today on my lunch break I enjoyed a creamy chicken and broccoli bake from the Atrium, and then decided to muck about with code and see what I could come up with.

Turning to the power of Nucleus, our one-stop-shop for data, tying it together with the Sphinx search engine we’ve used previously in Jerome, and wrapping it all up in the CWD I was able to come up with a glossy version of our existing Staff Directory.

Give it a whirl at http://phone.labs.lncn.eu.

Staff Directory v2, complete with Bakelite rotary dial phone.

It’s Just Awesome

Nick Jackson / / Open Data

Today and yesterday, between various other things, I’ve had a crack at solving Universal Search (mentioned previously), and I’ve currently got a bit of a mockup going at Labs. At the moment it’s only searching a very, very small set of test data but the entire supporting architecture is there; this is a working system, it just needs the content and a bit of polish on the front-end to handle some edge-case errors and IE6 (predictably). Obviously there’ll be some documentation on how to provide search sources and how to actually write some badass queries, but the majority of it is done.

It's the Universal Search!

The next step is to start plugging this in to external services. I’m going to start with the Library catalogue search from Jerome, making use of Sphinx’s distributed indexing model to avoid the need to double-up on data. Over time new services will be added, either sporting their own Sphinx search endpoints (the preferred way) or by outputting XML files for indexing by Universal Search itself.

Oh, and of course it comes with an API endpoint.

A Universal University Search

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Open Data, Web 2.0

During my time as a student I was faced with a great many challenges which involved some form of searching. Lots of it was academic, relying on the Library, Google Scholar and (gasp, horror, revoke his grades) Wikipedia. However, a lot of it was about more mundane stuff. Where exactly is AR1101? Who is John Smith, and what’s his phone number? What’s for lunch today?

The problem was that to find this information, you already had to know where to find it. Maps of the University are available on the Portal… if you know where to look. Phone numbers can be looked up… if you know the address for the service. The weekly menu is on the Portal… if you know where to look.

We’re left with a simply astonishing number of things which people may want to know about, but which is locked away as an image of a screenshot embedded in a Word document stored 14 levels down in Portal behind a page which nobody has access to, unless you happen to have asked for it. Rooms, events, books, journals, the Repository, blogs, people, news posts, lecture notes, the weekly menu and more are all available somewhere within the depths of a system. So, in traditional Nick fashion, I spent a few minutes in the shower this morning working out how to fix it whilst being refreshed by some particularly minty shower gel.

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