Aspire deployments can be divided 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. These use the supported application programing interfaces (APIs) of target repositories to access content, metadata, and security credentials. Where available, Aspire connectors capture the full directory structure from the repository, to support browsable enterprise site maps.
  • Content processing analyses, augments, and transforms content. Depending on the needs of the application this can involve simple use of regular expressions to a wide range of complex semantic and statistical processing techniques. Content processing can spawn Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs for large processing tasks.
  • Publishing refers to the components in an Aspire deployment that are responsible for pushing the processed text from the content processing pipeline(s) to the target system, typically a search engine or file directory, in the correct form, and where available using the search engine’s ingestion API. The applications that perform this function are called Aspire Publishers.  XML and JSON output is also available.

Functional Component Hierarchy

  • Component - atomic piece of Aspire logic
  • Configurable Component - single component wrapped with a DXF so it can be used with the Admin UI.
  • Application or Application Bundle - multiple component wrapped with a dxf and possibly configuration files).


Version Numbering

Aspire core releases are given version numbers to help identify what software an Aspire solution is built upon. The version number contains a major version, left most digit, that is reserved to denote the overall architecture. The second digit represents the minor version and denotes a release with new features. The third number, if present represents the stability release version, this denotes a release with multiple "bug fixes". In rare cases there can be a fourth digit if it is necessary to release a version with one or just a few bug fixes.

Currently the version numbers for Aspire connectors are the same as the major and minor releases. For example the current Jive connector and Aspire core are both 2.1. Over time the version numbers after the major digit can diverge. With the release of Aspire 2.0 the version dependencies between Aspire core and connectors and Publishers has been eliminated. This allows Search Technologies to release new versions of connectors or publishers between Aspire core releases. The major version number must always match.

Release Notes

Aspire release notes Open Source Components

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