Updated: I see blogs doing evaluations of the Q&A engine. I have to admit, that wasn’t my focus here. The service is merely 50 lines of code … just to demonstrate the integration of BMF and GAE.

Updated: Direct link to the example Question-Answering Service

Today I finally plugged-in the Yahoo Boss Mashup Framework into the Google App Engine environment. Google App Engine (GAE) provides a pretty sweet yet simple platform for executing Python applications on Google’s infrastructure. The Boss Mashup Framework (BMF) provides Python API’s for accessing Yahoo’s Search API’s as well remixing data a la SQL constructs. Running BMF on top of GAE is a seemingly natural progression, and quite arguably the easiest way to deploy Boss – so I spent today porting BMF to the GAE platform.

Here’s the full BMF-GAE integrated project source download.

There’s a README file included. Just unzip, put your appid’s in the config files, and you’re done. No setup or dependencies (easier than installing BMF standalone!). It’s a complete GAE project directory which includes a directory called yos which holds all the ported BMF code. Also made a number of improvements to the BMF code (SQL ‘where’ support, stopwords, yql.db refactoring, util & templates in yos namespace, yos.crawl.rest refactored & optimized, etc.).

The next natural thing to do is to develop a test application on top of this united framework. In the original BMF package, there’s an examples directory. In particular, ex6.py was able to answer some ‘when’ style questions. I simply wrapped that code as a function and referenced it as a GAE handler in main.py.

Here’s the ‘when’ q&a source code as a webpage (less than 25 lines).

The algorithm is quite easy – use the question as the search query and fetch 50 results via the Boss API. Count the dates that occur in the results’ abstracts, and simply return the most popular one.

For fun, following a similar pattern to the ‘when’ code, I developed another handler to answer ‘who’ or ‘what’ or ‘where’ style questions (finding the most popular capitalized phrase).

Here’s the complete example (just ~50 lines of code – bundled in project download):

Q&A Running Service Example

Keep in mind that this is just a quick proof of concept to hopefully showcase the power of BMF and the idea of Open Web Search.

If you’re interested in learning more about this Q&A system (or how to improve it), check out AskMSR – the original inspiration behind this example.

Also, shoutout to Sam for his very popular Yuil example, which is powered by BMF + GAE. The project download linked above is aimed to make it hopefully easier for people to build these types of web services.