An efficient and scalable search engine for models

Abstract

Search engines extract data from relevant sources and make them available to users via queries. A search engine typically crawls the web to gather data, analyses and indexes it and provides some query mechanism to obtain ranked results. There exist search engines for websites, images, code, etc., but the specific properties required to build a search engine for models have not been explored much. In the previous work, we presented MAR, a search engine for models which has been designed to support a query-by-example mechanism with fast response times and improved precision over simple text search engines. The goal of MAR is to assist developers in the task of finding relevant models. In this paper, we report new developments of MAR which are aimed at making it a useful and stable resource for the community. We present the crawling and analysis architecture with which we have processed about 600,000 models. The indexing process is now incremental and a new index for keyword-based search has been added. We have also added a web user interface intended to facilitate writing queries and exploring the results. Finally, we have evaluated the indexing times, the response time and search precision using different configurations. MAR has currently indexed over 500,000 valid models of different kinds, including Ecore meta-models, BPMN diagrams, UML models and Petri nets. MAR is available at http://mar-search.org.