A Solr Powered Architecture for Scientific Metadata Search Applications

Abstract:

Discovering and obtaining resources for scientific research is increasingly difficult but Open Source tools have been implemented to provide inexpensive solutions for scientific metadata search applications. Common practices used in modern web applications can improve the quality of scientific data as well as increase availability to a wider audience while reducing costs of maintenance. Motivated to improve discovery and access of scientific metadata hosted at NSIDC and the need to aggregate many areas of arctic research, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and Advanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (ACADIS) contributed to a shared codebase used by the NSIDC Search and Arctic Data Explorer (ADE) portals. We implemented the NSIDC Search and ADE to improve search and discovery of scientific metadata in many areas of cryospheric research. All parts of the applications are available free and open for reuse in other applications and portals. We have applied common techniques that are widely used by search applications around the web and with the goal of providing quick and easy access to scientific metadata. We adopted keyword search auto-suggest which provides a dynamic list of terms and phrases that closely match characters as the user types. Facet queries are another technique we have implemented to filter results based on aspects of the data like the instrument used or temporal duration of the data set. Service APIs provide a layer between the interface and the database and are shared between the NSIDC Search and ACADIS ADE interfaces. We also implemented a shared data store between both portals using Apache Solr (an Open Source search engine platform that stores and indexes XML documents) and leverage many powerful features including geospatial search and faceting. This presentation will discuss the application architecture as well as tools and techniques used to enhance search and discovery of scientific metadata.