Congratulations Judith. OJAX seems to have incorporated some of the
desirables Web 2.0 features for federated search service software.
However, after a couple of years working with the PerX project
(http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx), which has developed a pilot service
using similar technology to what OJAX uses, such as OAI-PMH and Lucene;
personally I am not totally convinced on the ultimate effectiveness of a
metadata-centric search service created and sustained using mainly
OAI-PMH. We have learned that in despite of its relative simplicity, an
OAI-PMH service can be harder to implement and maintain than expected.
We have spent a lot of effort harvesting, normalising and maintaining
metadata obtained from OAI data providers. In particular the issue of
metadata quality is an important factor here. A summary of our
experiences dealing with OAI-PMH can be found at
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00006394 PerX aims to provide a 'hybrid
search' utilising both harvested (OAI-PMH) and distributed search
(Z39.50, SRU) technologies. A final report outlining the maintenance
issues involved in the project is in progress but the experience gained
suggests that successful ongoing maintenance of OAI targets would
require a mixture of automated and manual approaches and that the level
of ongoing maintenance is high.
I am sure you are aware of these issues with OAI-PMH and I hope you can
answer some questions about OJAX usage and maintenance, such as: How
easy is the aggregated data by OJAX to maintain? Is the OAI harvesting
of metadata completely automated and free of human intervention? Is the
normalization (metadata quality, metadata augmentation, etc.) a complete
automatic process? We have found that the support for "deleted" records
from the majority of our OAI data providers is inconsistent: How good or
successful is the OAI-PMH notion of "incremental harvesting" in OJAX?
Which other issues should a developer/implementator considering OJAX
take into account?
Thanks,
Santy Chumbe
Judith Wusteman wrote:
> Apologies for any cross-posting.
>
> OJAX federated search service software is now in Beta release and
> available for download. Version 0.7 has improved performance,
> stability and user feedback, as well as additional features such as
> RSS/Atom feed support. (Atom feeds of stored searches alert users when
> new content matching their interests is harvested.)
>
> OJAX illustrates how federated search services can respond to new user
> expectations generated by Web 2.0:
>
> • Rich, dynamic user experience. OJAX uses Ajax technology to provide
> immediate dynamic response to user input.
>
> • Intuitive interface. The OJAX interface provides the simplicity and
> familiarity of Google but with the power of advanced search
> • Integration, interoperability and reuse. OJAX uses loosely coupled
> Web Services and supports the OpenSearch RSS standard, thus
> facilitating integration with a range of virtual library environments,
> institutional repositories, course management systems and
> institutional portals.
>
> • Open source standards-compliance. OJAX supports best-practice open
> source standards and software, including OpenSearch, OAI-PMH, StAX and
> Apache Lucene.
>
> Features of OJAX:
> * Auto-completion of search terms
> * Triggering of auto-searches
> * Dynamically scrollable search results - no more navigating between
> pages
> * Auto-expansion of search result details
> * Rapid sorting of results
> * Integrated with the Firefox 2 / IE 7 search feature
> * Supports OpenSearch Discovery
> * Stored searches as Atom feeds
> * Includes an OAI-PMH harvester
> * Easy to install in your own institution
>
> Further information, demo and download: http://ojax.sourceforge.net/
>
> Two alternative packages are available:
> 1. OJAX GUI, Web Services & Harvester
> 2. OJAX GUI, Web Services, Harvester & example repository index
>
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