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Why Aspire

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Aspire is flexible. By pulling data processing pipelines out of the search engine, Aspire uses its power and efficiency to:

• Manipulate content and metadata.
• Process that content and metadata in multiple pipelines simultaneously, and over multiple machines, for higher performance.
• Feed the content and metadata to one or more engines for indexing.

The Aspire framework supports creating Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning, and other analytic processing for text through a rich set of basic components.

You can install, start, stop, update, and uninstall Aspire components and applications.

• You won't need to reboot.
• You'll enjoy improved up-time and easier system administration.
• Each piece of Aspire processing functionality is a modular component that you can use by itself, or with other components to create an Aspire application.

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Administrator View

The administrator installs, configures, and maintains Aspire deployments. Manage Aspire deployments using a web-based, point-and-click interface, which is the same one an Aspire developer uses. However, an administrator needs to fill in only configuration information. Depending on your environment, you can use a single Aspire system administrator or several; each responsible for different content sources.

The System Administration UI has the following main functions.

• Configure properties for Aspire connectors
• Set up crawling schedules for repositories
• Manage full and incremental crawls
• Manage security
• Monitor system health and performance
• Monitor crawl statistics and performance
• Index auditing

Administration UI security

• Secure the Administration UI

Connection security

• Secure connections to Aspire

Document level security

• SOLR document security filtering
• Google Search Appliance filtering - Use any Aspire connector that provides the document ACLs is enough and normal GSA filtering works.
• SharePoint 2013 filtering (on premise)

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Developer View

Aspire deployments are built dynamically from components and subcomponentssub-components.

• Aspire also includes the concept of application bundles, which are groups of pre-packaged components

• .
• These perform a specific function and contain embedded files to define their look and feel within the Aspire Administration UI.
• System developers can combine components easily to process data according to the specific needs of an application.
• You can mix Standard Aspire components with custom third-party components or with new components.

The high level developer’s view of Aspire processing control is based on three major component types.

• Component managers
• Pipeline managers
• Tokenization manager

Aspire

Basic or Enterprise distribution

• Aspire Community (Deprecated)

• Aspire Basic and Enterprise

  • Aspire for Elasticsearch

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Aspire Features

Performance and reliability

• Distributed processing and automatic threading

• The ability to split document processing jobs into sub jobs that can run in parallel

• Standard technology to manage and restart processes on servers for high availability

• Can be placed within an architecture for Backup Failover backup failover

Ease of administration

• Make Makes dynamic (on-the-fly) configuration changes
• Dynamically add adds new components
• Dynamic refresh refreshs of component code
• Rich built-in XML processing methods including include XPath and XSLT
• Hierarchical component configuration
• Rich and comprehensive web-based administration and control interface

Strong developer environment

• Intuitive workflow interface
• Supports processing content in diverse languages
• Easy mapping of document fields to search fields
• Rich built-in JSON and XML processing methods including XPath and XSLT
• Use of scripting to build complex processing components
• Hierarchical component configuration
• Tightly integrated with Maven repositories to share and load component code
• Process streams of tokens to  perform text analytics
  • Entity extraction
  • Latent semantic analysis
  • Document vector creation and comparison
  • Topic analysis

Security support

• Handle Handles Proxy LDAP requests including:
  • Authenticating Authenticates users
  • Determine Determines user group membership across a multitude of systems

Federate search request support

• Distribute Distributed queries to multiple search engines
• Merge Merged search results

Hadoop support

• Write Writes to HDFS
• Include Includes Aspire within map / reduce jobs

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Structure of an Aspire

Solution

You can divide Aspire deployments into three high-level functional areas: content access, content processing, and publishing.

• Content access - Fetches the documents and associated metadata from the content repositories.
  
  • The applications that perform this function are called Aspire Connectors, which support Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) of target repositories.
  • They access content, metadata, and security credentials.
  • Where available, Aspire connectors capture the full directory structure from the repository and support "browsable" enterprise site maps.

• Content processing - Analyses, augments, and transforms content.
  
  • Depending on the application, this can involve use of regular expressions or a wide range of complex semantic and statistical processing techniques.
  • Content processing can spawn Hadoop map / reduce jobs for larger processing tasks.

• Publishing - Components in an Aspire deployment push processed text from the content processing pipelines to a target system in the correct form and, where available, using the search engine’s ingestion API.
  
  • The target system is typically a search engine or file directory.
  • The applications that perform this function are called Aspire Publishers.
  • XML and JSON output is also available.

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Functional

Component Hierarchy

• Component - An atomic piece of Aspire logic.

• Configurable Component - A single component wrapped with Dynamic XML Forms (DXF) for use with the Admin UI.
• Application or Application Bundle - Multiple components wrapped with DFX, and optionally, configuration files.

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Version

Numbering

Aspire Core releases use version numbers to identify which software an Aspire solution is built upon.

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  Left most digit - Contains a major version that is reserved to denote the overall architecture.
• Second digit - Represents the minor version and denotes a release with new features.
• Third number - Optionally, represents the stability release version. This denotes a release with multiple bug fixes.
• Fourth digit - Optionally, represents a release a version with one or only a few bug fixes.

Note: Aspire Connector version numbers match the major and minor releases. Over time, the numbers after the major digit can diverge.

There is no version dependency between Aspire Core and Connectors / Publishers. This allows Search Technologies to release new versions (of Connectors or Publishers) independently of Aspire Core releases. The major Major version number must always match.