We decided to make all sources of the SPREE prototype described in the last blog publicly available under GNU AGPL. The project homepage providing the sources and documentation can be found here. The prototype was developed for and in collaboration with the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories using Python and Turbogears for rapid prototyping. The Server is powered by CherryPy and we decided on Genshi for dynamic templating and the powerful SQLAlchemy for ORM. SPREE is strongly AJAX, thanks to a combination of Dojo and MochiKit. As part of the code, we also release the SPREE iGoogle and Google Desktop widgets that inform SPREE users about incoming questions.

The sources allow you to create your own knowledge sharing community, including automatic question classification and expert finding, real time communication using web chat and rating functionality.

Try SPREE and let us know what you think of it.

During my PhD work here at DAI-Labor, we developed a prototype of a social search engine called SPREE. SPREE is intended as an online community where every user shares his knowledge and benefits from the knowledge of other users alike. To this purpose, the system automatically channels user questions to the most qualified experts. Techniques involved during the expert identification process include natural language processing as well as a tfidf based hierarchical classification of questions to a given knowledge taxonomy. The algorithms are described in our SPREE paper.

The prototype was written in Python using the Turbgears framework on the server side and a combination of Dojo/Mochikit for most javascript (AJAX) related stuff. It was much fun using Python/Turbogears for rapid prototyping after years of Java development.

You can register to SPREE at http://www.askspree.de. Let me know how you like it.