Search front-end to Zotero Database

brucebest
Following up on my post from last year on this topic, just checking again to see if anyone has implemented a web-based full-text search front-end to a Zotero database.
As mentioned in the earlier post, I use Zotero to keep track of and note-up electronic legal decisions. What Zotero isn't so good at is finding stuff once it is in there, especially for someone else. Having a web-based search that would produce ranked results, with text excerpts and possibly even hit highlighting, would be fabulous.
So, has anyone set up something to give you a Google-like front-end to access documents stored in a Zotero database? If so, what tools did you use?

Thanks
  • mronkko
    I have been following the project for a while and do not think that anything like this is possible.
  • adamsmith
    I don't understand the web based part - not even sure how that would work. But for a local, desktop based version, have a look at the gnotero plugin.
  • brucebest
    Perhaps I wasn't clear; what I am talking about is building a separate search application, preferably accessible through a browser, that gives a better full-text search functionality, using an existing Zotero database as the data source.
    An example would be having the ability to "Search this Library" when you visit a Shared Group Library.

    You can search within Zotero, but the search does not rank documents at all, they are simply listed alphabetically, which makes it very hard to find what you are looking for (especially when you have a lot of related documents). This is even more the case if you don't actually know which specific documents you are looking for, e.g., you are doing research on a group library, including on documents you didn't necessarily put there yourself, looking to see what information there is on a particular subject.

    I'm sure this is possible for someone with the necessary skills to put together. To quote from this page,
      Neither the SQLite database nor the storage directory are meant to be modified outside of Zotero itself. They can, however, be modified via the Zotero data API from within Firefox and accessed in a read-only manner using external tools, offering users and third-party developers unlimited possibilities for analyzing and extracting data.
    A search function is doing just that -- analyzing and extracting data, without modifying the original data. Zotero uses SQLite, so presumably if you can write a search application for SQLite, you can write one using the Zotero database. Thus my original question -- has someone done something like this?
  • alandsloane
    I reckon these are not what brucebest is looking for either, but they might provide some useful facilities for him:

    (1) I've used the FF extension "SQLite Manager" to browse and search the Zotero database quite successfully. It allows you to execute any ad-hoc SQL query against the database, so there's quite a lot of flexibility there. For example, I used it to collect and sort Journal/Publication names so I could see where my sources were clustered.

    I understand that Zotero likes to have exclusive access to the SQLite database, so by rights you should probably set-up two FF profiles, or some such, so that you don't have both SQLite Manager and Zotero active at the same time. It didn't cause any problems for me, but I got nervous about it. You could also just make a copy of your zotero.sqlite, I guess - hadn't thought of that til now!

    (2) MIT's Citeline gives very similar facilities, but has a web interface. In the absence of Zotz (temporary, I hope) you'll need to export your library to BibTeX and upload it into Citeline. From there you can play around with "facets" and customize the display in various ways. You can also download the HTML for your "exhibit" (i.e. library) and incorporate it into a web-site or keep it locally.
  • adamsmith
    yep, that should be possible - "web based" was the misleading term there. Nothing along these lines has been done yet, as I said, gnotero is the only remotely similar app I know of atm and that doesn't rank either - it seems to search faster and I really like how it displays things, though.
  • sean
    I'm sure this is possible for someone with the necessary skills to put together.
    By all means, feel free to get cracking.
  • brucebest
    I don't know enough about programming to do it myself (or, for that matter, to even figure out how it would be done), but I will look into it. Just wanted to see if someone else had already done something like this, but looks like no.
  • sean
    We're still building out our web-based API, and Team Zotero alum Raymond Yee has done some great preliminary documentation on the functionality that currently exists (which could already probably do most of what you want). To access the Zotero db locally, please see our local API documentation.
  • Jackliu008
    I have a question about using Firefox add-on sqlite manager. I hope some of you can give me some suggestions. Here is the background information:

    Sometimes the automatically downloaded publication titles (journal names) are not consistent for the same journal, e.g., sometimes different versions of abbreviation can be added into the publicationtitle. Now I would like to use the sqlite manager to find out all the items that have the same "unwanted" journal names in the publicationtitle field, e.g., J Neurophysi, then change it at once into a "wanted" journal name, e.g., Journal of neurophysiology. Through this, I can make the publication tile consistent.

    But the question is that I cannot find the publication title when using this firefox add-on(sqlite manager). I can see the field, but no individual publication title (not like the author name or tags), and I cannot search a specific publication title. So could someone help me with this problem?

    Thanks and Merry Christmas!
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