Group items tagged

"Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (eg. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries. Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits. Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license."

"MasterKey is a growing and evolving family of tools for building sophisticated information discovery solutions. They can be used individually, or they can be combined together using a shared service-based architecture. Some of the tools have been released by Index Data under OSS (open source software) licenses, whereas others, at this time, are made available exclusively to our customers. To complement the software, Index Data offers a full range of support, consulting, and development services. For businesses, our components are flexible and modular enough to fit into practically any existing software platform. For consortia and larger libraries, we offer an opportunity to create a solution which is uniquely adapted to local needs, while also based on open software components and open standards."

" VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include: * Catalog Records * Locally Cached Journals * Digital Library Items * Institutional Repository * Institutional Bibliography * Other Library Collections and Resources VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings. VuFind has many APIs to interact with the search, data and many other features. You can syndicate your record data with other institutions via an OAI server. You can search using vufind's algorithms via OpenSearch. And if you want complete access to your indexed data, you can interact with Solr, VuFind's backend search and index engine."

"For more than 15 years, Index Data has built technologies and solutions in support of searching. Our customers and partners include national libraries and consortia, government agencies, and commercial companies. Our business is to seek out the most challenging problems in the area of metasearching and large-scale content indexing and searching, and to engineer industrial-strength tools to help people solve those problems. We have been active participants in and contributors to the international standards communities in our field since the very beginning. Our open-source protocol implementations are the most widely used in the industry and have had significant impact on both the evolution and penetration of international standards like Z39.50 and SRU. Because of our long history in this area, and our focus on building flexible, reusable tools for developers and organizations, our partners can focus their attention on adding value and on creating compelling user experiences. "

"It is hard to predict what the major challenge in search will be 100 years from now. The challenge may not even be related to information retrieval itself but could be the result of shortages of electricity, network disruptions due to insurgencies, information manipulation or access denial by an uncontrolled computer-based artificial intelligence (as imagined in the science fiction movie The Terminator). Of course, we could simply extrapolate the current ongoing trends, which we know do have an effect on information storage and retrieval, and might hope this gives an indication of some of the challenges that may affect finding and understanding information in a long-term perspective. In this article our focus will be on challenges that can be traced back to Time. Search is a two-sided issue: On one side, once data has been generated it has to be stored somewhere (on volatile or non-volatile media) and this stored data must somehow be accessible to a search or indexing engine; on the other side are the processes of search, retrieval and analysis of the data."

"The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a black-box system in that you install it, set up your options, and it runs. It is certainly standards-based: it indexes HTML and other popular formats; and the results are typically defined using XML and style sheets. But the options you can customize with regard to data sources, relevance ranking, and extended search (thesaurus, taxonomies, and parametric or faceted search) are somewhat limited. FAST, Autonomy/Verity K2, OmniFind and other traditional enterprise search engines have always been toolkits. You install the software and begin the process of customizing it for your environment. Data in databases or content repositories? No problem. Custom security implementation? Modify the indexing and search methods. Have custom thesauri or existing taxonomies? Plug them in. Need parametric or faceted search results? Small matter of programming - although not much. Want to change the way results are ranked or sorted? Use the native query syntax - for example, FAST Query Language (FQL) or the Verity Query Language (VQL)."

- To Fix A Leaky Sink: Envisioning The Potential of Discovery Layers - LENS: Catalog Records and Additional Data Sources in the Aquabrowser Implementation at the University of Chicago - Automated Metadata Repurposing Using eXtensible Catalog Software - Equality of Retrieval: Leveling the Metadata Playing Field in Big Indexes

"Endeca's revolutionary Information Access Platform (IAP) is the foundation of all our enterprise search solutions, and enables your business to rapidly and cost-effectively configure and deploy search applications that fit your business needs. By delivering configurable search-based business applications that offer any user interactive access to large volumes of any type of data, no matter the source or location, Endeca's IAP has differentiated itself from all other enterprise search technologies. With our innovative IAP, you'll have comprehensive functionality for connecting to and indexing enterprise content, and then exposing that information to your customers or employees with specific information needs."

"I don't think its obvious, but what OCLC is trying to do with WorldCat is much bolder than Serials Solutions and Summon. With Summon, libraries are basically throwing all of their content into one index to break down the data silos within an institution. But what you end up with is a big search silo for that institution. With WorldCat, the vision is to break down not only the silos within institutions but also the silos between institutions. And not just break down those silos in the sense of harvest-and-search. The concept is that libraries and their patrons will be working together to improve a shared database through intentional and professional metadata. This shared database will be big enough to have a real impact on the web. Its records will surface in search engine results. Its interface will be familiar to many, and it will be customizable for a particular audience via the WorldCat Local route."