On Apr 21, 2009, at 10:40 AM, Mike Taylor wrote:
I, and most of the people I've worked with, have been using the terms
"metasearch", "federated search", "broadcast search" and "distributed
search" synonymously for years. Have they now settled down into
having distinct meanings? If anyone could summarise, I'd be grateful.
Yes, to me, the quoted phases above are synonymous.
But I believe we are also seeing a new type of index manifesting
itself, and this new index has yet to be named. Specifically, I'm
thinking of the index where various types of content is aggregated
into a single index and then queried. For example, instead of
providing a federated search against one or more library catalogs, a
Z39.50 accessible journal article index, a local cache of harvested
OAI content, etc., I think we are beginning to see all of these
content silos (and others) brought together into a single (Solr/
Lucene) index and searched simultaneously. I'm not sure, but I think
this is how Summon works.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame
