A search engine for the engineering and equipment data management system (EDMS) at CERN

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, located in Geneva -Switzerland, is currently building the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), a 27 km particle accelerator. The equipment life-cycle management of this project is provided by the Engineering and Equipment Data Management System (EDMS [1] [2]) Service. Using an Oracle database, it supports the management and follow-up of different kinds of documentation through the whole life cycle of the LHC project: design, manufacturing, installation, commissioning data etc... The equipment data collection phase is now slowing down and the project is getting closer to the 'As-Built' phase: the phase of the project consuming and exploring the large volumes of data stored since 1996. Searching through millions of items of information (documents, equipment parts, operations...) multiplied by dozens of points of view (operators, maintainers...) requires an efficient and flexible search engine. This paper describes the process followed by the team to implement the search engine for the LHC As-built project in the EDMS Service. The emphasis is put on the design decision to decouple the search engine from any user interface, potentially enabling other systems to also use it. Projections, algorithms, and the planned implementation are described in this paper. The implementation of the first version started in early 2007.