IRIS Rexa Plugin

This document descibes the Rexa plugin for IRIS.

Overview

The REXA plugin for IRIS provides programmatic access to REXA web services. See http://rexa.info/ for more information about REXA. This document describes how REXA is integrated into IRIS.

Configuration

The main Spring configuration file is located at "plugins/rexa/bin/rexa.xml". This file is copied to plugins/rexa during the build. This file contains the following bean definitions:
See the rexa.xml file for bean documentation. Note also that the file plugins/rexa/rexa-startupOptions.xml can be used to only start IRIS with a minimal configuration that consists of the test servlet, the REXA services, and the IRIS data apps.

Getting Started

Rexa is automatically loaded when the "Full COnfiguration" option is used. Optionally, the "Rexa" option can be used when running IRIS which loads much faster but only loads Rexa components. This option can be used for testing, but normally it is recommended the full configuration option be used.

Rexa will be searched if one of the following events happens:
[People App Screenshot]

Note that a Rexa search can take a while. The actual search on the Rexa server is fast, but it takes a while to normalize the results with IRIS and create the ontology. This is why auto update is turned off.

Ontology

The REXA ontology usage is documented in rexa.owl. Click on this link to view ontology usage for Rexa (requires Firefox). Also note that links will be incomplete when viewing this file stand-alone. This file is compiled into the Ontology Usage Documentation (also requires Firefox) where it can be viewed without any problems.

Note that when Rexa sets citations, it pulls all the information for a cited article (ex: authors, title, etc.), but does not recursively retrieve citations for the cited articles, or else the entire Rexa database might be downloaded.

Also note that the IRIS datapp does not display article citations (it only displays file citations). To get a list of all citations, a SPARQL query can be used. For example:
select ?citationName ?articleName where {
    ?citation clib:citedBy ?article .
    ?citation clib:displayNameIs ?citationName .
    ?article clib:displayNameIs ?articleName .
}

API

The API classes corespond to the names of the beans above. For API documentation,see the Javadoc by clicking on the following API links:

Testing

Setup

In order for IRIS to query REXA, the REXA web service must be up an running. A simple test can be used to determine if the web service is running. Navigate to iris/plugins-src/rexa/src and execute the following:
    ant remoteTest -Durl="http://rexa3.cs.umass.edu:8180/dataservice"
Replace the URL with the URL for the REXA web service. Runnig this command will execute a query to the REXA web service to get all articles along with authors of the articles for "andrew mccallum". The results will look like:
main:
     [java] args<[http://rexa3.cs.umass.edu:8180/dataservice]>
     [java] Connecting to url<http://rexa3.cs.umass.edu:8180/dataservice>
     [java] Calling foo()
     [java] Done calling foo
     [java] Result: [{type=authorInfo, authorFullname=Andrew McCallum, rexaAutho
rID=56EDBB0348E551987A25682B616FC62ED92C50E5}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{t
ype=authors, value=Andrew McCallum and Kamal Nigam and Jason Rennie and Kristie
Seymore}]}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=Wei Li and Andre
w McCallum}]}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=Kamal Nigam a
nd Andrew McCallum and Sebastian Thrun and Tom M. Mitchell}]}, {type=article, li
stOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=William W. Cohen and Andrew McCallum and Dall
an Quass}]}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=Charles A. Sutt
on and Andrew McCallum}]}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=P
. G. Howlett and Ben Donovan and Andrew McCallum and L. E. NEWSTROM and D. A. J
Teulon}]}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=Mark Craven and D
an DiPasquo and Dayne Freitag and Andrew McCallum and Tom M. Mitchell and Kamal
Nigam and Seán Slattery}]}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=
T. Kevin Hitchens and Gregory J. Lukins and Yin Zhan and Andrew McCallum and Gor
don S. Rule}]}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=James Allan
and Javed Aslam and Nicholas J. Belkin and Chris Buckley and James P. Callan and
 W. Bruce Croft and Susan T. Dumais and Norbert Fuhr and Donna Harman and David
J. Harper and Djoerd Hiemstra and Thomas Hofmann and Eduard Hovy and Wessel Kraa
ij and John Lafferty and Victor Lavrenko and David D. Lewis and Liz Liddy and Ra
ghavan Manmatha and Andrew McCallum and Jay M. Ponte and John M. Prager and Drag
omir R. Radev and Philip Resnik and Stephen E. Robertson and Ronald Rosenfeld an
d Salim Roukos and Mark Sanderson and Richard Schwartz and Amit Singhal and Alan
 F. Smeaton and Howard R. Turtle and Ellen M. Voorhees and Ralph M. Weischedel a
nd Jinxi Xu and Chengxiang Zhai}]}, {type=authorInfo, authorFullname=R. Andrew M
cCallum, rexaAuthorID=a52972c77bb1816f5b164077ab159b991d7a23f2}, {type=article,
listOfItemMaps=[{type=authors, value=R. Andrew McCallum}]}, {type=authorInfo, au
thorFullname=R. Andrew McCallum, rexaAuthorID=741c3c9da02f154bddeddbb36f39362a97
fcf0e6}, {type=authorInfo, authorFullname=Andrew Kachites McCallum, rexaAuthorID
=27a4a779b1b3afea75c667ca8ec81fdc4c30d5bc}, {type=article, listOfItemMaps=[{type
=authors, value=Andrew Kachites McCallum and In S. Thrun and T. Mitchell}]}, {ty
pe=authorInfo, authorFullname=Andrew Kachites McCallum (mccallum@cs. cmu. edu, r
exaAuthorID=95b63361025982133439a9c7ac8be8f3c024777e}, {type=article, listOfItem
Maps=[{type=authors, value=Eugen Brenner and Steven R. Williams and E. H. Vermaa
s and Tobias Storch and Kyong-Hi Moon and Andrew Kachites McCallum (mccallum@cs.
 cmu. edu and Jina Mao and Sifen Luo and J-H Kirchner and S. Eletr and R. B. DuB
ridge and T. Burcham and Gudrun Albrecht}]}]