Installation instructions

Catch is a search engine based on Apache Solr specialized in querying a the gemeentemuseum collection.

You can build your own implementation for this kind of search engines using the code base of catch.

Overview of the catch implementation

The architecture of catch consists of 3 more ore less indepent parts:

1. Import of collection data in a Drupal content type containing all the fields that need to be available in the detail view of an object.
2. Creation of a Solr search index which can be used by any system.
3. Lightweight service between Solr and the end user to create specialized queries.

The import of collection data has been done using the adlibapi module together with the feeds module. The fields retrieved from adlib are mapped to a Drupal node type, using a specialized mapper. The creation of the Solr index has been done using the Search Api module, using the Apache Solr backend. The service is build using the Slim framework. Using Drupal only for rewriting queries to Solr would mean a performance hit. Because none of the Drupal funcionality would be used, a lean PHP micro framework would be enough.