Miles Worthington won the 2011 VIVO App contest with a bookmarklet called VIVO Searchlight. In 2013, Miles and a collaborator named Rob Agle have updated the Searchlight in significant ways for the AgriVIVO project that will make it easier to use in other contexts as well.
See the AgriVIVO Searchlight site for more information.
Here's an update from Miles from April, 2013:
Rob refactored the whole Searchlight application and turned it into more of a framework. Creating a custom Searchlight app now involves writing a very simple backend plugin to fit the backend being used, whether it's Solr, ElasticSearch, or something else. Rob wrote a backend plugin that searches the Solr index behind http://vivosearch.org, and I'm happy to say that we're finally running the Searchlight demo directly off of vivosearch.org. There were a few quirks that required workarounds, such as all Weill profile links being broken (no Weill in the results currently), and the Solr index not containing any overview statements (Rob has configured it to make an AJAX call for the bio text).
The relevance of Searchlight results is also improved. We do have some ideas for taking it even further and doing actual entity matching instead of plain text, but that would require some coordination with the VIVO project. The idea Rob and I had for AgriVIVO Searchlight was to extract AGROVOC terms from web pages and use those to match researcher profiles. However, the AgriVIVO profiles weren't quite robust enough yet to do that kind of matching.
A few days ago I moved the Searchlight demo app from my own EC2 instance to the EC2 instance serving
vivosearch.org. The backend plugin is set up to query Brian Caruso's index on Rollins. That plugin isn't shared anywhere else since Rollins isn't meant to be a publicly accessible server.
Running Searchlight against an out-of-the-box VIVO Solr index isn't possible quite yet. Some changes would need to be made to VIVO's Solr config and additional properties would need to be indexed for people.
Although it's taken a while, I hope there's still some interest in Searchlight. Rob and I would be interested in doing further development if any opportunities arise in upcoming projects.
The code for Searchlight and Rob's excellent documentation are available here:
