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Ereuna is a configurable Apache Lucene-based framework that allows for the rapid development of search facilities. Designed and developed by José Miguel Vieira at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, it has already been used on a number of humanities projects, including Fine Rolls, Hofmeister XIX, InsAph and Iaph2007.
The aim in developing Ereuna was to speed up the development of indexing and search facilities for web applications. The framework can be used with a wide range of materials (XML or non-XML based) and it reduces the need for specific programming skills (such as expertise with Apache Lucene). It is language-independent.
Research is still ongoing, but the first phase of the project has been completed. Ereuna is being developed to integrate closely with other CCH-developed tools such as xMod and sUPL and follows similar principles: that tools should be standards-based, easy to customise and easy to integrate with other applications.
We will provide more detailed information on the tool in the future, but the principles are as follows:
- You supply a repository of XML documents structured according to certain criteria (typically this involves pre-processing source materials for the search tool to 'digest')
- Intermediate indexable versions of these XML files are created using an XSLT stylesheet
- The Lucene indexer is run
- Searches are performed using the Lucene index that is thereby created
The main benefits of Ereuna are that:
- It is a dynamic lucene-based tool
- It is a highly configurable environment for the rapid development of search facilities
- The fields are highly configurable to create search functions which can vary drastically from project to project
- It doesn't require the source materials to be XML necessarily- for example these can be extracted from a relational database or from plain text files
- It doesn't need specialist programming skills in Java and Lucene
- It is human language independent and Unicode-based
