Indexing and retrieving the D4Science infrastructure social networking data: a search framework

Science is in continuous evolution and so are the approaches and methodologies scientists demand to apply by requesting for appropriate supporting environments. These environments offer new scientific investigation possibilities by exploiting recent technology advances. In this report, we present the D4Science IT infrastructure, developed to serve the needs of various communities of practice yet based on a technology which is domain agnostic, and the D4Science web-based working environment describing the social networking applications composing it. These applications are conceptually borrowed from social networks yet adapted to deal with the scientific data practices. They offer the possibility of effectively sharing "Big Data" or scientific products by exploiting a scalable and elastic access to tools and computing capabilities provided by D4Science. We discuss an approach for a Search Framework, to be used on top of these applications originated data, offering full-text search capabilities through the use of services compliant with the cloud paradigms. We describe the key features, the use cases and the architecture design, together with its implementation, of the Search Framework explaining in detail the software components characterising it.