Breaking Out of the Box: Creating Customized Metasearch Services Using an XML API

Breaking Out of the Box: Creating Customized Metasearch Services Using an XML API

Roy Tennant, California Digital Library

What is Breaking Out of the Box?

• Using an XML-based Application Program Interface (API) to an application instead of the native interface

• Requires building an interface layer to:• Accept user input, package it up, and send it to the API• Receive the XML response from the API and process it,

perhaps spawning additional requests to the API• Perform (optionally) other tasks not performed by the

application; e.g., querying another application and merging the response into the user interface

Why Break Out of the Box?

• Much greater interface flexibility• Interface customizations remain despite

system upgrades • Increased ability to integrate with other

systems• Ability to add new functions and services not

supported by the vendor:• Spell checking• Recommendation services

The MetaLib X-Server

• MetaLib is a metasearch application from ExLibris• X-Server is MetaLib’s XML-based API• Until recently a very small set of MetaLib functions,

poorly documented• Increased customer interest renewed ExLibris’

commitment to it, with upgrades significantly adding to functionality and documentation vastly improved

• Some new customers are acquiring MetaLib with the intent of never using the native interface

www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/x-server-l.html

Why CDL is Breaking Out of the Box

• Our vision is of many search portals:• Tailored to specific audiences (earth science

faculty and grad students) and/or purposes (a few good things)

• Branded locally (we serve ten campuses)

• The native interface presented difficult, systemic barriers to customization

• The native interface was rife with browser-specific Javascript and substandard HTML

Why CDL is Breaking Out of the Box

• At CDL, we envision metasearching as an infrastructure that supports the integration of (at least):

1. Search results from multiple databases

2. Search results from an index of metadata harvested from remote repositories

3. Search results from an index of crawled web pages (targeted on a selected set of sites)

4. Recommendations of other places to search based on the user’s query

5. RSS feeds of new articles and resources

• Typical metasearch applications only do #1

Undergrad portal with suggestions of subject databases

MetaLib X-Server Case Studies

• CSU San Marcos• David Walker

• Interactive University, UCB• Raymond Yee

• California Digital Library• Mike McKenna