One of the large German language robot-based search services, Fireball
(http://www.fireball.de), seems to be the first major service of that type outside the
DC community to offer full metadata searchability.
(Our Nordic Web Index http://nwi.ub2.lu.se/?lang=en offers DC aware
metadata databases generated from a national web index, for Sweden and Denmark.
The Australian metadata database from DSTC http://www.dstc.edu.au/cgi-bin/RDU/Harvest/meta_simple_query.cgi is not
integrated
with a national web index, as far as I know)
Fireball uses AltaVista software, but allows to search all individual metadata fields
individually or with Boolean combinations. Unfortunately in a command mode only.
However, still a progress compared with Alta Vista, which dosn't allow to search
the metadata separately at all and which treats the keywords and description
words from the META fields like normal words from the document's full text.
(In the new AltaVista help pages seems all information on metadata creation
and treatment removed).
The backside with the German solution is that they are using their own metadata
scheme (cf. http://www.fireball.de/meta_daten.html ). There is an obvious risk
that Fireball will contribute to the creation of non-standard and non- compatible
metadata (in Germany) on a large scale and hamper the dissemination of DC
solutions. They offer of course their own metadata creator (http://www.fireball.de/metagenerator.html ) connected to
the harvesting robot.
Since we know, how fast big search services are copying each others features,
we should all carefully watch our big Web indices (the catalogue services as well)
and try to influence them to implement DC solutions.
The big (national or broader) web search services offering metadata-based
retrieval are, as far as I know: AltaVista, Infoseek and Swiss Search.
All three use the same, non-standard scheme (keywords, description). Only
Swiss Search allows to limit the search to a metadata field
(http://www.search.ch/help.html.en). Several IR companies have announced
metadata based advanced search services for the near future.
Regards,
Traugott Koch
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| TRAUGOTT KOCH, Electronic information services librarian |
| LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, Development Department NetLab, |
| P.O. Box 3. S-221 00 Lund, Sweden |
| Tel: int+46 46 2229233 Fax: int+46 46 2223682 or 2224422 |
| E-mail: [log in to unmask] |
| Personal homepage: http://www.ub2.lu.se/koch.html |
| "Lund University Electronic Library": http://www.ub2.lu.se/ |
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