A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.u k UKOLN is supported by: Is Metasearching Really Better Searching? STM Innovations Seminar London, Friday 2 December 2005 Pete Johnston Research Officer, UKOLN, University of Bath www.bath.ac.u k
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A centre of expertise in digital information management UKOLN is supported by: Is Metasearching Really Better Searching? STM Innovations.
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A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
UKOLN is supported by:
Is MetasearchingReally Better Searching?
STM Innovations SeminarLondon, Friday 2 December 2005
Pete Johnston
Research Officer, UKOLN, University of Bath
www.bath.ac.uk
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
Is Metasearching Better Searching?
• What is metasearch?• Making metasearch work
– The NISO Metasearch Initiative
• Metasearch today– Metasearch and Google– Metasearch and "social bookmarking"
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
What is metasearch?
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
• Harvesting– Better performance for user query– Options for normalisation etc by harvester– Only as up-to-date as last harvest
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
A hospitable climate for metasearch?
• Metasearch service depends on access to metadata• Web Services
– Standards for providing machine interfaces to applications on Web– Based on HTTP and XML– SOAP (messaging protocol), WSDL (service description), WS-* (!!)– WS not just for search! – Service-oriented approaches, modular applications– Google and Amazon provide Web Services
• "Web 2.0"– "The Web as platform"– Recombining data and services from multiple sources
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
The problems with metasearch
• User requires/expects resources from increasing range of content providers
• What if content provider doesn't implement standard search/harvest interface?
• Some proprietary APIs, "XML Gateways"– Scalability
• Some "screen-scraping"– Parsing of HTML pages to obtain metadata– Rights issues– Scalability, volatility
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
The problems with metasearch
• Metasearch services work, but….• For service provider
– complex, laborious– fragile, susceptible to change by content
provider– duplication of effort by service providers
• For content provider– concerns over efficiency– concerns over access management– rights, branding, results presentation/ranking
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
Making metasearch work
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
Making metasearch work• Effective metasearch requires agreements between
content providers and service providers– Transport protocol(s)– Query language(s)
• syntax and semantics– Metadata schemas
• syntax and semantics– Metadata quality
• presence of values, formats of literals etc– Intellectual property rights issues
• how metadata records and resources are presented, used– Authorisation / authentication– Disclosure / discovery of collections and services
Andy Powell, "Metasearching: an overview", Presentation to BCS EPSG Seminar, July 2004
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
The NISO Metasearch Initiative
• Response to concerns of librarians, systems vendors, content providers
• Aims to enable– metasearch service providers to offer more
effective and responsive services – content providers to deliver enhanced content and
protect their intellectual property – libraries to deliver services that distinguish their
services from Google and other free web services
NISO MetaSearch initiativehttp://www.niso.org/committees/MS_initiative.html
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
Task Group 1: Access Management• Conducted survey of authentication methods
in use• Developed use cases for authentication in
metasearch context• Ranked methods by ability to satisfy needs of
use cases• Recommends either:
– IP-Authentication with a Proxy Server, or– Username/Password authentication
• Liaison with Shibboleth community
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
Task Group 2: Collection Description• Metasearch service needs information
about targets available for search/harvest– Discover collections of potential interest– Obtain sufficient information to identify a
collection– Select one or more collections from amongst a
number of discovered collections– Discover the services that provide access to
the collection
– Select a service with which to interact– Interact with service
Collectiondescription
Servicedescription
Metasearch 1 Metasearch 2
Collection/ServiceKnowledge Base 1
Collection/ServiceKnowledge Base 2
SharedCollection/Service
Registry
A centre of expertise in digital information management www.ukoln.ac.uk
Task Group 2: Collection Description
• Collection Description Specification– Metadata schema for collection-level