The Company
ASTER is the consortium for Innovation and Technology Transfer within the of Emilia-Romagna Regional Government and at the service of companies, universities and the territory. It promotes industrial research as the main driver for sustainable economic development, in harmony with social growth and well-being, and collaborates with business associations to develop research-enterprise strategies and joint actions.
The Challenge
Designing and developing the Energy Efficiency Semantic Search engine to search for information concerning energy efficiency in Websites, File systems, Databases and heterogeneous data sources:
• Uniformly displaying the contents of documents sought by the user through simple search
• Extending the possibility of searching by categories and with semantic navigation tools
• Accessing with no limits to the contents of sources indexed by the search engine
• Converging in one international platform the whole collection of contents from 9 different portals focusing on energy-related good practices
The solution
Energy Efficiency Semantic Search engine
Designing and developing the Energy Efficiency Semantic Search engine based on the Open Source Apache Solr framework, as well as on Google technology for indexing web resources.
• Indexing and searching for dynamic and static web pages, Office-suite documents, PDFs, e-mails, images and multimedia content
• Semantic searching by browsing the network of Concepts within the documents
• Categorized (faceted) searching by Keyword, Geographic searching, by Themes and by type of Users
• Multilingual searching: finding documents in English while searching in Italian and vice versa
• Customizing the ranking of documents in the outcomes
Results
• Dedicated search engine, that guarantees superior results to the main search engines like Bing or Google
• Efficient search guaranteed by a single access point to heterogeneous information
• Improvement in the assessment and control of environmental quality, in the management of natural resources, and in the development of renewable energy sources