(apologies for cross-posting) All, The Semantic Search research group at Yahoo! Labs is pleased to announce the open-source code release and public demo of Glimmer, a search engine for RDF data. Glimmer, the search engine [1] provides support for offline distributed indexing of RDF data using Hadoop MapReduce. It also contains an online ranking component using a state-of-the-art method based on BM25F, previously published as [2]. Both of these components are built on top of MG4J, a highly-scalable open-source search engine written entirely in Java [3]. Glimmer is available on Github under an Apache 2.0 license. The Glimmer demo [4] allows searching over 750m triples of data, the subset of the Web Data Commons [5] collection that uses the schema.org namespace. We choose to demonstrate Glimmer on this dataset because so far it has been only accessible as a static download. We hope that providing API access will make it easier to analyze the data (which previously required AWS payment) and to develop innovative applications. We plan to add more collections to the demo in the future. The demo makes it possible to search the data by keywords or by selecting a class from the taxonomy shown on the right. It is also possible to restrict matches to the values of particular predicates and combine such matches using the standard boolean operators. See [6] for more information. We welcome bug reports as well as feature suggestions for future release of Glimmer and the public demo [7]. Lastly, we would like to thank the help and support of Paolo Boldi and Sebastiano Vigna (University of Milano) as well as Yahoo's Open Source Working Group. Best regards, The SemSearch group @ Yahoo! Labs [1] https://github.com/yahoo/Glimmer [2] Roi Blanco, Peter Mika, Sebastiano Vigna: Effective and Efficient Entity Search in RDF Data. International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2011, pages 83-97. http://www.dc.fi.udc.es/~roi/publications/iswc2011.pdf [3] http://mg4j.dsi.unimi.it/ [4] http://glimmer.research.yahoo.com/ [5] http://www.webdatacommons.org/ [6] https://github.com/yahoo/Glimmer/wiki/Web-App-Help [7] https://github.com/yahoo/Glimmer/issues

Received on Thursday, 20 June 2013 18:12:38 UTC