Adaptation and Maintenance of the Search Tool “BLE‑X”

European Research Association for Sheet Metal Working

The search tool “BLE‑X” is one building block of an online shop for research reports. The web interface allows searching in the full-text of over 1,700 documents. In this project, the software was both extended by an administrator area and continuously maintained.

Project Context

The European Research Association for Sheet Metal Working supports its member companies during all phases of a research project, from application to the final report. These research reports may then be purchases by another member from the online shop.

Since research reports are often large documents covering multiple topics, a simple search in metadata (e.g., title, authors, and summary) is often not sufficient. Instead, the web application allows searching in the full-text of PDF documents, and shows relevant search results together with their respective PDF pages. Additionally, documents are automatically analyzed for their similarity to each other and visualized as clusters. Thus, documents from different topics can be easily distinguished without the need to read them in extensive detail.

In case a user finds an interesting research report, they may navigate to the actual online shop and add it to their shopping cart.

The original web application was developed as part of a research project between the European Research Association for Sheet Metal Working and the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group of the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg.

Used Technologies

The web application consists of a Java backend and jQuery frontend. PDF documents are processed and indexed using the software libraries Apache PDFBox and Lucene. The similarity analysis is based on a research study by the Data & Knowledge Engineering Group. First, documents are transformed into vectors by counting word occurrences. Then, documents are visualized using the method of “multidimensional scaling”. The additional administrator interface is implemented with React.

Scope of Services

During the project, the following services were provided:

• Implementation of an administration area that allows adding and editing documents
• Linking of the web application with the online shop
• Continuous maintenance and server administration