SMART: An open source framework for searching the physical world

User queries are becoming increasingly local where people are interested in what their friends are up to or what is happening in their local area. Sensors can assist in localised information retrieval by giving the search engine direct access to events happening in the local world. In this paper, we describe an open source framework to search in realtime multimedia and social streams. The SMART framework offers a platform to retrieve information from both the physical world and from people interactions on social media. Examples where this framework can be useful include“smart cities”where people can have information needs such as ‘what parts of the city has live music on and what do people think about those music events?’. We identify the challenges of building such a framework and the motivations behind releasing it as open source software. The open architecture of the framework brings about possibilities for extending it and deploying it in a wide variety of novel applications.