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:
- If in the configuration file auto update is enabled (see rexa.xml), then whenever a
Person instance is created the IRIS Rexa plugin will wait for a small
amount of time (this is configurable, see rexa.xml) and then will use
the Person's full name to search Rexa. For example, this would happen
after harvesting email and reifying Person instances for the email.
- In the IRIS Person DataApp is a button to launch a Rexa search
for the selected Peron. After clicking this button the button next to
it will become enabled and clicking the progress button shows a dialog
with the progress (and it allows the user to cancel). Below is a
screenshot showing this.
![[People App Screenshot]](peopleApp.jpg)
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}]}]