WebMIaS on Docker: Deploying Math-Aware Search in a Single Line of Code

TL;DR

This paper presents a Docker-based deployment method for WebMIaS, a math-aware search engine, enabling easy, fast, and robust deployment in a single command to facilitate wider adoption and development.

Contribution

It introduces a Docker containerization approach for WebMIaS, simplifying deployment and maintenance compared to previous complex manual setups.

Findings

Docker deployment reduces setup time to a single command.

Containerization improves WebMIaS's robustness and ease of maintenance.

Facilitates community development and integration of math-aware search engines.

Abstract

Math informational retrieval (MIR) search engines are absent in the wide-spread production use, even though documents in the STEM fields contain many mathematical formulae, which are sometimes more important than text for understanding. We have developed and open-sourced the WebMIaS MIR search engine that has been successfully deployed in the European Digital Mathematics Library (EuDML). However, its deployment is difficult to automate due to the complexity of this task. Moreover, the solutions developed so far to tackle this challenge are imperfect in terms of speed, maintenance, and robustness. In this paper, we will describe the virtualization of WebMIaS using Docker that solves all three problems and allows anyone to deploy containerized WebMIaS in a single line of code. The publicly available Docker image will also help the community push the development of math-aware search engines in the ARQMath workshop series.