FoxyLucy

FoxyLucy

Gordon Coleman, Patricia Williams, Brian Cassidy, Elizabeth Sadler, Julian Pardy

What is FoxyLucy?

FoxyLucy ...
embeds Lucene in a Firefox extension to index content discovered by the browser.

In sort-of-plain English ...

Your browser indexes every page you view, stores that externally in a Lucene "database" via the Lucene Web Service, and allows you to search for content.


Puzzle Metaphor

Existing pieces of the puzzle ...
  • Lucene: neato very fast "search engine"/indexing tool as a Java library
  • Lucene as a Web Service: Java servlet on top of Tomcat+Lucene
 
Missing pieces ...
  • Javascript client library which talks to Lucene Web Service
  • Firefox extension

Firefox extension


Prior art ...

  • existing data-mining applications which parse pages -- could the code be repurposed ...?

Javascript Client Library


Prior art ...
  • Sage extention parses Atom feeds -- but cannot produce ...
 
Object model ...
  • service object, document object, field object

Chronology of the day

[09:00-10:30] choosing topics
[10:30-04:30] bringing all team members to common base line of understanding
[11:00-03:18] fighting to get Lucene WS running on a public server ... (Brian emphasizes it's not Lucene-WS's fault, there were institutional network issues)
[01:30-03:20] searching for prior art
[03:20-03:40] insane decision to begin coding ... fortunately, decision aborted
[03:40] discovery that Google Desktop has this "search pages visited" functionality
[03:40-04:30] much typing on keyboards, not sure what people are doing ...

Considerations

Unexpected side benefits