Open Source Federated Search Tools
Mar 13th, 2006 by Karen
I’ve been really interested in trying to incorporate federated search and federated search results into the Libraries website and have been looking at different tools which I might use to do this. In my search I discovered several open source federated search tools. dbWiz and Keystone DLS are both provide open source federated searching. I haven’t really learned a lot about either of these product yet. However, volume 23 issues 4 of Library Hi Tech has a good article on dbWiz that explains what the software does and how it was created. One of the things that caught my eye in the article was the “it is also possible to embed a dbWiz search box directly into any web page”. The article talks about doing this on subject guide pages which is something that I’ve been thinking about doing for more than a year.
Truthfully, I’d like to take it further than this and have the results returned on the libraries site. I also would like to be able to construct collections to be federated searched on the fly. I don’t know if this will be possible in the near term but is definately something I’d like to work on down the road.
Keystone looks interesting, especially it’s made by the company behind the open source Z server used in Koha and other open source products.
I’m the lead developer on the dbWiz project at Simon Fraser University. We are currently very close to having a “straight forward to install” package for dbWiz.
While you are free to download the code that is currently available, I do urge you to wait a couple of weeks while the install package is ready (along with a bunch of documentataion)
Sesat is an open sourced Search Middleware with federation capabilities and a built-in search portal framework. Sesat enables a single user query to be dispatched to multiple information sources. The result is analysed, weighted and presented to the user according to configurable business rules.
Mck,
Thanks for you comment. It is nice to know about some of the metasearch technologies out there for general web searching. This post is focused more on federated searching for library databases and catalog. This data isn’t indexable or searchable by normal web search engines. At least not most of the time, there are a few exceptions where libraries have cobbled together support for OpenSearch as part of their catalog.