Building a faceted browser in CouchDB using views on views and erlang metaprogramming

  • Authors:

  • Claus Zinn

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Linguistics, University of Tübingen

  • Venue:
  • WFLP'11 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Functional and constraint logic programming
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Consider sets of XML documents where documents from the same set adhere to the same schema, and documents from different sets adhere to a different schema. All documents describe language resources and tools, but as their schemas differ so differ their use of descriptors and the values they can hold. The collection of metadata documents and schemas is open and can get extended anytime. This paper describes a solution to the problem of storing all documents in a single database and making them accessible to naive users to easily identify language resources and tools according to their needs and interest. The proposed storage solution makes use of the document-based database CouchDB; for easy access, we propose a combination of faceted search and full-text search, allowing users without intricate knowledge about metadata descriptors to explore all documents in a systematic manner. Faceted search is entirely bootstrapped using CouchDB views and meta-views that we meta-programmed in Erlang given a declarative facet specification.