For a completely different project we are starting sth similar. A federated, distributed registry of citizens. It could solve a lot of the problems described in people search.
It will be a graph-based solution (SONES technology). Jan ----- Original Message ----- From: statusnet-dev-boun...@lists.status.net <statusnet-dev-boun...@lists.status.net> To: Giorgos Logiotatidis <sea...@sealabs.net> Cc: statusnet-dev@lists.status.net <statusnet-dev@lists.status.net> Sent: Mon Apr 05 09:44:46 2010 Subject: Re: [StatusNet-dev] GSOC - People search server Giorgos Logiotatidis wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I'm posting my view on the proposed idea "People search server" for the > Google Summer of Code [1]. Being able to search for people and groups > among different websites supporting the ostatus protocol is a must for > the network to grow and evolve as a distributed open source social > platform. > > The search server could read feeds from sites about new registrations, > updates, etc. It'd probably be better to PuSH them. > Feeds are parsed and saved in a local database by a daemon > (besides the RDBMS, a noSQL database can be used for increased speed and > better structure of the data). > Really? Are NoSQL databases faster than RDBMSes? Are they better for structuring data? > A Django or PHP powered website can provide to the end user a simple, > clean interface to search for people and get a direct answer from our > local database. Maybe a smart way to do it would be to build a plugin on top of StatusNet. We've got most of the basics (profile database, OStatus subscription, object model) built-in already. In general, the more your proposed codebase diverges from StatusNet's (programming language/libraries/frameworks), the less likely we are to accept it. We'll need to maintain this code in the future. > Spam bots submitting feeds, or searching, can be easily blocked by > integrating recaptcha [2] but more sophisticated techniques would need > something better (does spamassasin already have rules for > microblogging? :) > Probably not. > Spoofing will be an interesting field for research. Using GPG keys -for > the techies- or a "web-of-trust" -e.g. promoting users that have many > subscribers to the search results- could be interesting approaches. > Again, PuSH might be the answer here. However, we do already have RSA keys related to accounts, so there may be some value. > As an extra: A crawler can be build to automatically find ostatus > compatible websites -carefully avoiding spam- and add their user > registration feeds to our aggregator. > This is an incredibly hard job. -Evan -- Evan Prodromou CEO, StatusNet, Inc. e...@status.net - http://evan.status.net/ - +1-438-380-4801 _______________________________________________ StatusNet-dev mailing list StatusNet-dev@lists.status.net http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev _______________________________________________ StatusNet-dev mailing list StatusNet-dev@lists.status.net http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
