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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

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

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  1. Breaking Out of the Box:Creating Customized Metasearch Services Using an XML API Roy Tennant, California Digital Library

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

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

  6. 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

  7. Why CDL is Breaking Out of the Box • At CDL, we envision metasearching as an infrastructure that supports the integration of (at least): • Search results from multiple databases • Search results from an index of metadata harvested from remote repositories • Search results from an index of crawled web pages (targeted on a selected set of sites) • Recommendations of other places to search based on the user’s query • RSS feeds of new articles and resources • Typical metasearch applications only do #1

  8. Undergrad portal with suggestions of subject databases

  9. CSU San Marcos David Walker Interactive University, UCB Raymond Yee California Digital Library Mike McKenna MetaLib X-Server Case Studies

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