Distributed Web-Scale Infrastructure for Crawling, Indexing and Search with Semantic Support

In this paper, we describe our work in progress in the scope of web-scale information extraction and information retrieval utilizing distributed computing. We present a distributed architecture built on top of the MapReduce paradigm for information retrieval, information processing and intelligent search supported by spatial capabilities. Proposed architecture is focused on crawling documents in several different formats, information extraction, lightweight semantic annotation of the extracted information, indexing of extracted information and finally on indexing of documents based on the geo-spatial information found in a document. We demonstrate the architecture on two use cases, where the first is search in job offers retrieved from the LinkedIn portal and the second is search in BBC news feeds and discuss several problems we had to face during the implementation. We also discuss spatial search applications for both cases because both LinkedIn job offer pages and BBC news feeds contain a lot of spatial information to extract and process.