[Koha-devel] ElasticSearch for Koha - presenting the Koha Gruppo Italiano's project

[Paul Poulain]

Le 05/02/2014 17:34, Stefano Bargioni a écrit :
> We are very interested to hearing your first impressions, your
> suggestions etc. about this proposed project. Please respond to this
> e-mail if you have any comments. Probably the best contributions
> during this early phase will be the definition of the fundamentals.
> Example:
> 
> - Which search engine? - ElasticSearch, Solr or other (even if, at
> this time, the name of the initial project is ElasticSearch for
> Koha)?
The best option / more long term is to add an abstraction layer, then we
should be able to switch to any search engine. BibLibre made work around
that, before and during KohaCon12.
We could not pursue the effort (lack of funding), but there's already a
framework (that partially work with Solr)

> - Should the effort focus on complementing Zebra or on its
> replacement?
We should focus on letting libraries *choose*.

Why did the community decide not to *replace* zebra by Solr, 3 years ago
? Because Solr requires a lot of ressources, is hard to setup, require
tomcat/java and all that stuff. OTOH, zebra (is a pain to change, but
run out of the box with Koha and ) requires only a few hardware ressources.
But for sure, zebra is a project not evolving anymore, that will be
outdated sooner or later (and my opinion is that it is already outdated
in terms of lemmatization, soundex, suggestions, facets, languages
support,...)

So let's rewrite Koha search layer, to have some abstraction, then let
the user choose between zebra, Solr, ElasticSearch, Bing, or anything
that will appear in the next years, ... [*]

An important point = Koha *must* provide a z39.50 server. With zebra, it
was built in. With Solr, we wrote something. What about ElasticSearch ?
> - Subdivide the workload. - Draft a road map.
> 
> We are grateful to all developers who will be contributing to our
> project. We hope that this project is seen favorably within the
> community, and specifically wish that the Librarian community
> worldwide see the benefits of this project and would be willing to
> assist us with finding financial support.
We had some discussion by mail when you asked if you could come to
Marseille for the hackfest to talk about that. So you already know my
opinion here = I'm *very* happy to see someone trying to take the lead
on this matter !

[*] a troll is hidden in this list, can you find it ?
-- 
Paul POULAIN - BibLibre
http://www.biblibre.com
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