FAQ — Answering the most asked questions
Frequently asked questions
General
AbsClust is hosted on University of Rostock infrastructure in Germany, and uploaded datasets are accessible only to the account that uploaded them. Search queries and document excerpts are processed either by models running on that infrastructure or by named third-party providers, and we do not run any web analytics or tracking. What we process, on what legal basis, and how long we keep it is set out in full in our Privacy Policy.
The hosted version of AbsClust is built for scientific articles, and custom datasets accept published articles as PDF files. The underlying approach is not specific to publications, so if you run your own instance you can adapt it to other document collections.
Yes. AbsClust is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, so you can deploy the whole discovery system yourself and point it at your own data archive.
- Self-hosting — run the stack on your own servers with Docker.
- Custom archives — index your own publications, documents or drawings instead of the public database.
- Own models — swap in the language and embedding models you are allowed to use.
The source code and deployment instructions are available on GitHub.
For the open AbsClust version, we use the Semantic Scholar database of 200 million articles. When self-hosting, the database can be adjusted to any kind of customized databases and archives.
The public instance runs in Germany, on infrastructure provided by the University of Rostock. Because the project is open source, you can also run your own on-premise instance.
Yes. AbsClust is an open-source project — the hosted instance is free to use and the source code is published under the Apache 2.0 licence.
Currently, AbsClust works for both German and English. We are working on providing more languages in the future.
Hosted at the
University of Rostock
AbsClust is an open-source research project. The University of Rostock provides the infrastructure that the public instance runs on, which keeps the tool freely available to the research community.
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