A comparison between public-domain search engines

The enormous amount of information available today on the Internet requires the use of search tools such as search engines, meta-search engines and directories for rapid retrieval of useful and appropriate information. Indexing a website\u27s content by search engine allows its information to be located quickly and improves the site\u27s usability. In the case of a large number of pages distributed over different systems (e.g. an organization with several autonomous branches/departments) a local search engine rapidly provides a comprehensive overview of all information and services offered. Local indexing generally has fewer requirements than global indexing (i.e. resources, performance, code optimization), thus public-domain SW can be used effectively. In this paper, we compare four open-source search engines available in the Unix environment in order to evaluate their features and effectiveness, and to understand any problems that may arise in an operative environment. Specifically, the comparison includes: - The SW features (installation, configuration options, scalability); - User interfaces; - The overall performance when indexing a sample page set; - Effectiveness of searches; - State of development and maintenance; - Documentation and support

2 P2P or Not 2 P2P?

In the hope of stimulating discussion, we present a heuristic decision tree that designers can use to judge the likely suitability of a P2P architecture for their applications. It is based on the characteristics of a wide range of P2P systems from the literature, both proposed and deployed.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Impact of Digital Technology on Library Resource Sharing: Revisiting LABELNET in the Digital Age

The digital environment has facilitated resource sharing by breaking the time and distance barriers to efficient document delivery. However, for the librarians, this phenomenon has brought more challenging technical and technological issues demanding addition of more knowledge and skills to learn and new standards to develop. The overwhelming speed and growing volume of digital information is now becoming unable to acquire and manage by single libraries. Resource sharing, which used to be a side business in the librarianship trade, is now becoming the flagship operation in the library projects

The multi-faceted use of the OAI-PMH in the LANL Repository

This paper focuses on the multifaceted use of the OAI-PMH in a repository architecture designed to store digital assets at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and to make the stored assets available in a uniform way to various downstream applications. In the architecture, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language is used as the XML-based format to represent complex digital objects. Upon ingestion, these objects are stored in a multitude of autonomous OAI-PMH repositories. An OAI-PMH compliant Repository Index keeps track of the creation and location of all those repositories, whereas an Identifier Resolver keeps track of the location of individual objects. An OAI-PMH Federator is introduced as a single-point-of-access to downstream harvesters. It hides the complexity of the environment to those harvesters, and allows them to obtain transformations of stored objects. While the proposed architecture is described in the context of the LANL library, the paper will also touch on its more general applicability

Distributed Information Retrieval using Keyword Auctions

This report motivates the need for large-scale distributed approaches to information retrieval, and proposes solutions based on keyword auctions

An artefact repository to support distributed software engineering

The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) system is a component of the GENESIS platform designed to non-invasively inter-operate with work-flow management systems, development tools and existing repository systems to support a distributed software engineering team working collaboratively. Every artefact possesses a collection of associated meta-data, both standard and domain-specific presented as an XML document. Within OSCAR, artefacts are made aware of changes to related artefacts using notifications, allowing them to modify their own meta-data actively in contrast to other software repositories where users must perform all and any modifications, however trivial. This recording of events, including user interactions provides a complete picture of an artefact's life from creation to (eventual) retirement with the intention of supporting collaboration both amongst the members of the software engineering team and agents acting on their behalf