Navigart

Case Study by Nukomeet · 10/2015

Navigart is a web application that helps discover the contemporary collections of French public museums. A user can easily browse and discover artworks along with their metadata information using an innovative real-time search engine.

Project background

Videomuseum is a consortium of museums and other public structures managing modern and contemporary art collections (national museums, town, county or regional authority museums, etc) which gathered to develop methods and tools using new technologies to inventory and disseminate the knowledge of the heritage of modern and contemporary art.

Nukomeet intervention was to build a scalable architecture where a search engine on the frontend could easily communicate with the underlying database cluster through a reliable backend engine.

Our involvement

The role of Nukomeet was to conduct the conception and building of the application from scratch. Through consulting with the client, we defined the needs and established detailed specifications and mockups that were used as a roadmap during development. From the very beginning the application was architected to be very robust and also remarkable simple to use.

For this project we opted for a micro service architecture, i.e. we built several independent and loosely coupled services, each with a specific goal

Services we have provided

Web

API

Technologies

We used Ruby API interacting with an Elasticsearch cluster on the backend and AngularJS on the frontend.

AngularJS is a structural javascript framework for dynamic web apps maintained by Google and community of individual developers. It gives ability to use HTML as your template language and extend HTML's syntax to express your application's components clearly and succinctly. Angular's data binding and dependency injection eliminate much of the code you would otherwise have to write. And it all happens within the browser, making it an ideal partner with any server technology.

Elasticsearch is a search server based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents. The scope of work required the use of advanced Elasticsearch features such as advanced search queries, aggregations and performance optimizations.

Impact

The application presents the art in a modern way, making it more available to the broader audience; it helps discover art in a new and innovative manner, allowing users to enjoy culture gathered in museums for years .

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