<chapter id="introduction">
- <!-- $Id: introduction.xml,v 1.33 2006-06-13 13:45:08 marc Exp $ -->
+ <!-- $Id: introduction.xml,v 1.34 2006-06-30 13:58:07 marc Exp $ -->
<title>Introduction</title>
<sect1>
</para>
<para>
- Z39.50 protocol support:
+ <ulink url="&url.z39.50;">Z39.50</ulink> protocol support:
</para>
<para>
Segmentation (support for very large records), Delete, Scan
(index browsing), Sort, Close and support for the ``update''
Extended Service to add or replace an existing XML record.
- <!-- Adam says:
- * Supported
- You can insert/delete/replace an XML record given an
- "external" ID. Actually this way of doing ES Update was
- meant for an OAI application that Ian Ibbotson had in
- mind to implement. The "update" command in YAZ client
- implements this on the client side. My plan is to make
- this available in ZOOM "extended" soon..
- -->
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
+
+
+ <para>
+ <ulink url="&url.sru;">SRU</ulink> Web Service support:
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ <itemizedlist>
+ <listitem>
+ <para>
+ The protocol operations <literal>explain</literal>,
+ <literal>searchRetrieve</literal> and <literal>scan</literal>
+ are supported.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ <para>
+ <ulink url="&url.cql;">CQL</ulink> to internal query model RPN
+ conversion is supported.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ <para>
+ Multiple XML record formats
+ for data retrieval are supported, modelled over the GRS-1, SUTRS,
+ MARC record formats. Records can be mapped between record
+ schemas on the fly. Arbitrarily complex XSLT transformations
+ can be applied during record retrieval if one uses the
+ <literal>alvis</literal> filter module.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ <para>
+ Additional PQF query syntax for
+ <literal>searchRetrieve</literal>
+ and <literal>scan</literal> operations is supported.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+
+ </itemizedlist>
+
+ </para>
+
</sect1>
- <sect1 id="apps">
- <title>Applications</title>
+ <sect1 id="introduction-apps">
+ <title>References and Zebra based Applications</title>
<para>
Zebra has been deployed in numerous applications, in both the
academic and commercial worlds, in application domains as diverse
Notable applications include the following:
</para>
+
+ <sect2>
+ <title>Koha free open-source ILS</title>
+ <para>
+ <ulink url="http://www.koha.org/">Koha</ulink> is a full-featured
+ open-source ILS, initially developed in
+ New Zealand by Katipo Communications Ltd, and first deployed in
+ January of 2000 for Horowhenua Library Trust. It is currently
+ maintained by a team of software providers and library technology
+ staff from around the globe.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ <ulink url="http://liblime.com/">LibLime</ulink>,
+ a company that is marketing and supporting Koha, adds in
+ the new release of Koha 3.0 the Zebra
+ database server to drive its bibliographic database.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ In early 2005, the Koha project development team began looking at
+ ways to improve MARC support and overcome scalability limitations
+ in the Koha 2.x series. After extensive evaluations of the best
+ of the Open Source textual database engines - including MySQL
+ full-text searching, PostgreSQL, Lucene and Plucene - the team
+ selected Zebra.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ "Zebra completely eliminates scalability limitations, because it
+ can support tens of millions of records." explained Joshua
+ Ferraro, LibLime's Technology President and Koha's Project
+ Release Manager. "Our performance tests showed search results in
+ under a second for databases with over 5 million records on a
+ modest i386 900Mhz test server."
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ "Zebra also includes support for true boolean search expressions
+ and relevance-ranked free-text queries, both of which the Koha
+ 2.x series lack. Zebra also supports incremental and safe
+ database updates, which allow on-the-fly record
+ management. Finally, since Zebra has at its heart the Z39.50
+ protocol, it greatly improves Koha's support for that critical
+ library standard."
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Although the bibliographic database will be moved to Zebra, Koha
+ 3.0 will continue to use a relational SQL-based database design
+ for the 'factual' database. "Relational database managers have
+ their strengths, in spite of their inability to handle large
+ numbers of bibliographic records efficiently," summed up Ferraro,
+ "We're taking the best from both worlds in our redesigned Koha
+ 3.0.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+ <sect2>
+ <title>Emilda open source ILS</title>
+ <para>
+ <ulink url="http://www.emilda.org/">Emilda</ulink>
+ is a complete Integrated Library System, released under the
+ GNU General Public License. It has a
+ full featured Web-OPAC, allowing comprehensive system management
+ from virtually any computer with an Internet connection, has
+ template based layout allowing anyone to alter the visual
+ appearance of Emilda, and is
+ XML based language for fast and easy portability to virtually any
+ language.
+ Currently, Emilda is used at three schools in Espoo, Finland.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ As a surplus, 100% MARC compatibility has been achieved using the
+ Zebra Server from Index Data as backend server.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+ <sect2>
+ <title>ReIndex.Net web based ILS</title>
+ <para>
+ <ulink url="http://www.reindex.net/index.php?lang=en">Reindex.net</ulink>
+ is a netbased library service offering all
+ traditional functions on a very high level plus many new
+ services. Reindex.net is a comprehensive and powerful WEB system
+ based on standards such as XML and Z39.50.
+ updates. Reindex supports MARC21, danMARC eller Dublin Core with
+ UTF8-encoding.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Reindex.net runs on GNU/Debian Linux with Zebra and Simpleserver
+ from Index
+ Data for bibliographic data. The reational database system
+ Sybase 9 XML is used for
+ administrative data.
+ Internally MARCXML is used for bibliographical records. Update
+ utilizes Z39.50 extended services.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+
<sect2>
<title>DADS - the DTV Article Database Service</title>
<para>
</sect2>
<sect2>
- <title>NLI-Z39.50 - a Natural Language Interface for Libraries</title>
- <para>
- Fernuniversität Hagen in Germany have developed a natural
- language interface for access to library databases.
- <!-- <ulink
- url="http://ki212.fernuni-hagen.de/nli/NLIintro.html"/> -->
- In order to evaluate this interface for recall and precision, they
- chose Zebra as the basis for retrieval effectiveness. The Zebra
- server contains a copy of the GIRT database, consisting of more
- than 76000 records in SGML format (bibliographic records from
- social science), which are mapped to MARC for presentation.
- </para>
- <para>
- (GIRT is the German Indexing and Retrieval Testdatabase. It is a
- standard German-language test database for intelligent indexing
- and retrieval systems. See
- <ulink url="http://www.gesis.org/forschung/informationstechnologie/clef-delos.htm"/>)
- </para>
+ <title>Alvis</title>
<para>
- Evaluation will take place as part of the TREC/CLEF campaign 2003
- <ulink url="http://clef.iei.pi.cnr.it"/>.
- <!-- or <ulink url="http://www4.eurospider.ch/CLEF/"/> -->
- </para>
- <para>
- For more information, contact Johannes Leveling
- <email>Johannes.Leveling@FernUni-Hagen.De</email>
- </para>
- </sect2>
+ The <ulink url="http://www.alvis.info/alvis/">Alvis</ulink> EU
+ project run under the 6th Framework (IST-1-002068-STP)
+ is building a semantic-based peer-to-peer search engine. A
+ consortium of eleven partners from six different European
+ Community countries plus Switzerland and China contribute
+ expertise in a broad range of specialties including network
+ topologies, routing algorithms, linguistic analysis and
+ bioinformatics.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The Zebra information retrieval indexing machine is used inside
+ the Alvis framework to
+ manage huge collections of natural language processed and
+ enhanced XML data, coming from a topic relevant web crawl.
+ In this application, Zebra swallows and manages 37GB of XML data
+ in about 4 hours, resulting in search timese of fraction of
+ seconds.
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
<sect2>
<title>ULS (Union List of Serials)</title>
</sect2>
<sect2>
+ <title>NLI-Z39.50 - a Natural Language Interface for Libraries</title>
+ <para>
+ Fernuniversität Hagen in Germany have developed a natural
+ language interface for access to library databases.
+ <!-- <ulink
+ url="http://ki212.fernuni-hagen.de/nli/NLIintro.html"/> -->
+ In order to evaluate this interface for recall and precision, they
+ chose Zebra as the basis for retrieval effectiveness. The Zebra
+ server contains a copy of the GIRT database, consisting of more
+ than 76000 records in SGML format (bibliographic records from
+ social science), which are mapped to MARC for presentation.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ (GIRT is the German Indexing and Retrieval Testdatabase. It is a
+ standard German-language test database for intelligent indexing
+ and retrieval systems. See
+ <ulink url="http://www.gesis.org/forschung/informationstechnologie/clef-delos.htm"/>)
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Evaluation will take place as part of the TREC/CLEF campaign 2003
+ <ulink url="http://clef.iei.pi.cnr.it"/>.
+ <!-- or <ulink url="http://www4.eurospider.ch/CLEF/"/> -->
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ For more information, contact Johannes Leveling
+ <email>Johannes.Leveling@FernUni-Hagen.De</email>
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+ <sect2>
<title>Various web indexes</title>
<para>
Zebra has been used by a variety of institutions to construct
</para>
<para>
Kang-Jin Lee
- <email>lee@arco.de</email>,
has recently modified the Harvest web indexer to use Zebra as
its native repository engine. His comments on the switch over
from the old engine are revealing:
projects / idzebra-moved-to-github.git / commitdiff