Building Social into Drupal Search

A customer had an existing Drupal powered Intranet site. They were excited to tell us about a project they were building for a collaborative workspace for a group of researchers that was customized to manage Karyotyping images. The collaborative workspace would tie together a number of collaboration tools they already had in use - Drupal, Jumper 2.0, and DSpace.

A researcher would create an image that needed to be stored in Dspace. The image would be uploaded to the DSpace repository. The workflow they were building would manage this process via scripts. The Drupal search module was customized to let users search for specific image thumbnails on the Intranet site. Drupal is chiefly focused on handling HTML content, so Gallery2 was installed to generate thumbnails on a preview page and extract embedded metadata.

Drupal would push the image to the DSpace repository and store the metadata and thumbnails in the Gallery. When images are recorded, Drupal offers users the option to include additional related tag objects created in Jumper 2.0. When users record a new image they have an option to tag the document or image using the Jumper 2.0 tag engine. The image is then assigned a unique identifier in the repository and published in a news feed.

The new image is picked up via the published feed and stored in the Gallery module of the research project's Drupal site. Included in the feed are the image, metadata (including the unique identifier), tag profile with pointers to any related objects. Another researcher learns that the new image is available to examine. A module was written to provide a workflow for the feeds so that the new items showed up in a block in "my workspace," and an was email generated by the notify module. Other researchers could click on a reference link to view the full res image, compare the image in the Gallery module to other images, they could click on reference links to related papers published in Connotea, they could read and edit the tag profile with new annotations, comments, or notes to build more knowledge around the image.

Using Jumper 2.0 tagging there is now a rich set of metadata associated with the image. The new metadata was published as feeds and picked up for inclusion in the DSpace repository housing the original archived image. This publishing cycle was ongoing for the life of a specific research project. The rich metadata that Jumper delivers provided the context, meaning and value to the image that was missing in traditional metadata. Critical provenance information was provided as well as links to related images or published papers. All of this made the search results more relevant.

Proposing an Open Index Initiative

Many of the customers who download Jumper are using it for personal search. They are using it themselves, or in a small company, or between a few colleagues. Jumper has many benefits that make it an ideal personal search engine, however, if you are using Jumper in this way you are missing one of its big benefits – collaborative sharing of resources. In a larger community of uses with a shared interest or profession the number of searchable resources grows rapidly and the inherent value of Jumper search increases accordingly.

In an effort to facilitate resource sharing among the many customers who use Jumper for personal search we are proposing an Open Index initiative.

Jumper will make a shared index database available for download on Sourceforge under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. This Open Index will be built by users like you, who share your tag profiles with other users, who in turn share their tag profiles with you. This collaborative initiative will be aggregated by Jumper in a central Open Index that will be available for download on Sourceforge.

This means that you can share and change the index database as you choose.
• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:
• Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial — You may not use this data directly for commercial purposes. You cannot resell or repackage this data for commercial benefit. You cannot commercially benefit by providing access to this data. The intent for use is that any benefit will only be derived indirectly by using this data to search for resources that may provide a commercial benefit as a result.
• Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same license to this one.
It is important to understand that when you contribute your resources to the common index for the general good of all that it can only be used under these license guidelines.

There are two ways you can easily contribute.

You can export your Jumper index database and send the flat file to us via Email at Open Index

Or you can add individual resources to the open index via the Open Index form.