caterpillar 1.0.0.dev15

Text retrieval and analytics engine.

What is Caterpillar?

Caterpillar is a pure python text indexing and analytics library. Some features include:

• pluggable key/value object store for storage (currently only implementation is SQLite)

• transaction layer for reading/writing (along with associated locking semantics)

• supports searching indexes with some built in scoring algorithm implementations (including TF/IDF)

• stores additional data structures for analytics above and beyond traditional information retrieval data structures

• has a plugin architecture for quickly accessing the data structures and performing custom analytics

• has 100% test coverage

Quick Example

Quick example of using caterpillar below:

import os
import tempfile

from caterpillar.processing.index import IndexWriter, IndexConfig
from caterpillar.processing.schema import TEXT, Schema, NUMERIC
from caterpillar.storage.sqlite import SqliteStorage

index_dir = os.path.join(tempfile.mkdtemp(), "examples")
with open('caterpillar/test_resources/moby.txt', 'r') as f:
    data = f.read()
    with IndexWriter(index_dir, IndexConfig(SqliteStorage, Schema(text=TEXT, some_number=NUMERIC))) as writer:
        writer.add_document(text=data, some_number=1)

Installation

pip install caterpillar

Documentation

The documentation can be found here.

Roadmap

We are working on porting our issues from our internal issue tracker over to a more visible system. But, for the time being, here is a general roadmap:

• Move to (possibly only) Python 3 (see below).

• Revamp schema and field design.

• Add a memory storage implementation.

• Revamp query design.

• Remove the NLTK dependency (great library, but only used for tokenisation).

• Switch index structures over to a more efficient data structure (possibly numpy arrays or similar).

The current plan is to move to using GitHub issues with HuBoard, but stay tuned.

Python Version

Currently Python 2.7+ only. Work is underway to support Python 3+. WARNING: Caterpillar might become Python 3+ only in the future. Stay tuned.

BDFLs

• Kris Rogers

• Ryan Stuart

Contributors

Anyone who is willing! In other words none yet, but we are more then accepting of contributions.

Contributing

Not code will be merged unless it has 100% test coverage and passes pep8. We code with a line length of 120 characters (see tox.ini [pep8] section) and we use py.test for testing. Tests are in a test sub-folder in each package. We generally run coverage as follows:

coverage erase; coverage run --source caterpillar -m py.test -v caterpillar; coverage report

Copyright and License

Caterpillar is copyright © 2013 - 2015 Kapiche Limited. It is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The copyright holders grant you an additional permission under Section 7 of the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3, exempting you from the requirement in Section 6 of the GNU General Public License, version 3, to accompany Corresponding Source with Installation Information for the Program or any work based on the Program. You are still required to comply with all other Section 6 requirements to provide Corresponding Source.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.