Art For Sale

Project for Information Retrieval course.

Search engine to display for sale artworks. Around 8,500k~ documents indexed from art selling related websites, served in a user-friendly interface.

Features

• Simple:
  • Result presentation
  • Filtering
• Complex:
  • Automatic recommendation

Webpages

• https://www.artsy.net/
• https://www.artfinder.com/
• https://www.saatchiart.com/

Setup

Download Poetry to handle the project dependencies.

Poetry creates a virtual environment for the project, to activate it select it as local interpreter in IDE or run poetry shell in the terminal to join the poetry environment.

Run poetry install --no-root to install the dependencies from within the virtual env.

All commands assume dependencies are installed in your python virtual environment e.g. poetry env, venv, etc

Crawler

Web crawling feature uses the Scrapy open source Python framework for extracting data in a fast, simple and extensible way.

The webpages are crawled by the spiders, which scrapy the web pages and get documents out of every post regarding selling art with its major info:

• author
• title
• price
• description
• categories
• image url reference
• post url reference

the crawler project is in crawler/.

To run a website crawler, got into crawler/ directory and run:

scrapy crawl crawler-name -O file-data.json

Indexer

The indexer is a microservice using a FastAPI application exposing a REST API running in uvicorn ASGI server at port 8001.

Technologies:

• PyTerrier
• Pandas
• FastAPI
• uvicorn

The inverted index creation process:

• load the list of document results in json format given from crawlers
• convert the json entries into a pandas dataframe
• index it with Pyterrier DFIndexer class to generate the inverted index
• retrieve docs with Batch using BM25 model

Functionalities offered are:

• query the indexer, GET req.
• regenerate the inverted index, POST req

Backend and indexer are separated to allow for a more flexible deployment and separation of concerns in microservices architecture infrastructure.

To run indexer with hot reload, get into crawler/ directory and run:

uvicorn index:app --reload --port 8001

Backend

Django.

To run the backend with hot reload, run the python script inside the backend/ folder:

./manage.py runserver

Frontend

Vuejs, vite, typescript

To run the frontend with hot reload:

yarn run dev

User Evaluation

SUS

Troubleshooting

Remember: do not name files as popular python modules e.g. pyterrier

Problem: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named '_bz2'. solution

# beware of path assumptions made here for python version and distro
sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev
sudo cp /usr/lib/python3.10/lib-dynload/_bz2.cpython-310-x86_64-linux-gnu.so  /usr/local/lib/python3.10/

Problem: common MS Windows issues

• set JAVA_HOME in system environment variables for Pyterrier lookup
• jvm.dll not found, download jdk from oracle containing both JDK and JRE

DevOps

pip3 installs from PyPI an incompatible version of pyterrier 0.9.x with latest pandas 2.0.0 >: spotted issue in pyterrier/index.py file from pyterrier module because using a deprecated API call on pandas dataframe

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76200452/error-while-iterating-over-dataframe-columns-entries-attributeerror-series

Solution: enforce newer pyterrier version 0.10.x from repository

References

• HTTP methods
• Pyterrier repository