Introduction

Text for Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, is written using right-to-left (RTL) character sets and is not necessarily legible to scholars or religious people who are often familiar with only a Western character set. As such, there is a need for a search tool that allows input in a Latin-based character set on a normal QWERTY keyboard and doing the search against a corpus in a Semitic character set.

This repository contains the code to CorpusSearch, which, at its core is a web application to allow phonetic searching of the sacred texts of Semitic languages as well as a tool that permits socially reading sacred Semitic texts (such as the Hebrew Bible or the Arabic Qur'an).

I made this to get my hand at several technologies:

Technology	Purpose
Python	Prototyping / validating search algorithm
ASP.net	Backend framework
C#	Strong typing of ASP.NET backend
gRPC	Communication between search service / web server
GraphQL	Communication between web server and front end
Angular 2	Frontend Framework
Typescript	Strong typing for Angula frontend
Redis	Caching of search results
RabbitMQ	For messaging related to social reading

There are several parts to this repository:

1. A quick search prototype, written in Python
2. A search microservice, written in C#, which communicates using gRPC
3. An ASP.net microservice (written in C#), handling

Phonetic Search Index Prototype

Introduction

The search prototype was written for two reasons:

1. Allow downloading of a Semitic corpus (in this case the Arabic Qur'an), and
2. Validate the methodology for the search algorithm

You can re-generate the corpus from scratch by downloading it from the web (though it is provided as part of the source code in this repository, so is not strictly required). Once the corpus is generated, you can run a phonetic search on the text using.

As it is meant to be a quick prototype, the code is written in Python.

Running the Prototype Code

To fetch the corpus data (this step is optional, as the data is shipped with the repository):

    python3 fetch_data.py

Next, to run the search, first build the Docker container, and then run it:

    cd Prototype
    docker build -t arabic-search  .
    # Runs the search term in `search_poc.py`
    docker run arabic-search

Searching Phonetically

Introduction

The C# and ASP.net-based solution has several projects within:

1. SearchMicroservice - a gRPC based micro-service for performing phonetic searches on corpus texts
2. SearchMicroserviceTests - tests for the SearchMicroservice
3. SearchWebServer - a ASP.net / Angular / GraphQL based web app project that provides a UI for performing the search

Running the Project

To run the project, open the solution in Visual Studio 2019 (the solution file is called /Search.sln). To run the web application, only running the microservice and web server is required. Follow these steps to get the project running:

1. Restore NuGet packages (Project > Restore NuGet Packages)
2. Build the projects (Project > Build All)
3. Select the proper run configuration (or define a run configuration that has both projects selected - SearchMicroservice and SearchWebserver). Start the project without debugging.

To access the search GraphQL API, access the graphical interface at http://localhost:59836/graphql/. Perform a phonetic search as follows:

query {
  phoneticSearch(term:"innama") {
    __typename
    chapter
    verse
    score
    text
  }
}