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               ALERT's Hound: A general purpose search service
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Hound is a general purpose search service that is included in the suite of
services offered by the ALERT platform [1]. Hound provides a generic search
interface to retrieve information and relationships retrieved from data about
software development processes, in particular for Free, Libre and Open Source
Software (FLOSS) projects.

The service provides a REST interface and a simple search form for users to
enter their queries. Information is then retrieved from the rest of the ALERT
services and components (metadata service, KEUI, recommendation service, etc.).

This is a basic service to demonstrate the capability of ALERT to improve the
software development experience, saving time and effort of project members in
repetitive and error-prone tasks, such as detection of duplicate bugs and other
types of relationships between different information sources (e.g. Version
Control System and Issue Tracking System).

== Features ==

Hound currently supports only simple search operations:
    - Search for extended information about an issue.
    - Find possible duplicate issues for a given issue.
    - Find commits related to a given issue.
    - Include time restrictions when performing queries (temporal window)
    
== Future work ==

- Incorporate related information from other different data sources (forum
posts, wikis, messages in mailing lists, etc.).
- Live update of search results as more information becomes available for the
ALERT system.
- Improve perfomance by chaching frequent types of queries and results.
- Better user interface.

== Requirements ==

- Python (>= 2.6)
- Django (>= 1.3)
- Tastypie (>= 0.9.1.) for REST interface
- ActiveMQ (= 5.5.1)
- ActiveMQ-cpp ( = 3.0.1)
- pyActiveMQ ( = r203)
- MySQL (>= 5.0)
- Additional ALERT services must also be available for Hound to work correctly
(metadata, recommendation, KEUI, etc.).

== Links ==

[1] http://www.alert-project.eu/