ESPRESSO: Efficient Search over Personal Repositories - Secure and Sovereign

Lead Research Organisation: Birkbeck, University of London
Department Name: Computer Science and Information Systems

Abstract

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Title ESPRESSO Search System 
Description The open source license of the software is: AGPL-3.0 The ESPRESSO project (espressoproject.org) researches, develops, and evaluates decentralised algorithms, meta-information data structures, and indexing techniques to enable large-scale data search across personal online datastores, taking into account varying access rights and caching requirements. This involves a number of Solid servers (see solidproject.org) that are inter-connected via an overlay GaianDB network (https://github.com/gaiandb/). The ESPRESSO system contains the following components that are installed alongside each Solid server in the network: - An indexing app (Brewmaster), that indexes the pods, and creates and maintains indexes inside each pod, along with a meta-index for the Solid server as a whole. - A search app (CoffeeFilter), that performs the local search on the pods of a Solid server. - An overlay network (the prototype system uses a custom build of GaianDB) that connects the servers, and routes and propagates the queries. - A user interface app (Barista) that receives search queries from the user and presents the search results. 
Type Of Technology Webtool/Application 
Year Produced 2024 
Open Source License? Yes  
Impact The software release is only a few weeks old. It has enabled the project to run experiments that will benefit the research community with initial insights on performance and trade-offs of decentralised search. The results of that experimentation have informed the project work that has been published so far and two additional publications that are to be presented at the Web Conference 2024 conference and published in its proceedings. The open source publication of the software is expected to enable members of the research community beyond the project to engage with this research. 
URL https://github.com/espressogroup/ESPRESSO
 
Description Research Visit and Workshop at the NExT Research Centre, National University of Singapore 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact The workshop explored the research challenges of decentralised information systems from the perspective of search and information retrieval. The challenges of decentralised recommendation and AI decentralised information retrieval were discussed. Researchers from the project partners and other visiting researchers were involved. A proposal for a workshop at the Web Conference 2024 was submitted to enable wider discussion on the topics. The workshop proposal was accepted for inclusion in the Web Conference programme and is to take place on 13 May 2024.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023