Development of an indexing search engine for the UMVF: proposal for an indexing method based on Dublin Core and XML

Abstract

International audienceThe UMVF (French Virtual Medical University) has many heterogeneous resources hosted by the servers of university partners of the project. One of its objectives is to develop an efficient tool to perform a single search on these resources. We first defined a standardized and interoperable indexing method. For each document, an XML file containing information on the fifteen elements of Dublin Core was created. We checked its structure and content with a DTD. If the XML file was valid, its data were then integrated into a central database from which the engine carried out a search. We tested our tool successfully with the resources hosted by the Rennes Laboratory of Medical Informatics in cooperation with the Radiology Medical Campus [1]. Our method allows the standardization of the production of information by the various servers and it conforms to the constraints of the semantic Web owing to the technologies chosen