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The IMesh Toolkit
[ Work In Hand > Technology Review > Products ]
ASF Freeware
(information based also on Martin Hamilton's analysis)
| Providers | ASF (U.S. Government departments and commercial partners.) Details Product Download Community support is available via the asf@cni.org mailing list. Some of the packages included have conflicting copyright; additional code written by the ASF group has no copyright assignment. |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Provides a set of components to provide capabilities for making a set of documents searchable. The documents can be internal or located at remote sites. Documents can be made searchable through the web. The freeware distribution contains all the components necessary to provide at least the minimal service. Based on the ASF interoperability framework for (predominantly) government information. |
| Approach | Integrates freeware components. The distribution combines components in a way which is compatible with the ASF architectural model. The individual components themselves may be interchanged with other ASF-compatible software or upgraded to commercial implementations. The components included in the ASF Freeware distribution are a web server for enabling web-based searches; a Z39.50 server for serving out documents; a search engine for indexing; a web-crawler for gathering information from remote web sites; a web to Z39.50 gateway; |
| Platform and requirements | The Freeware ASF distribution runs on a unix or Linux platform. Requires Perl and C/C++ compiler. |
| Components and their technology | |
| Server | An Apache web server comes with the distribution; A YAZ-based Z39.50 database server (ASFserv); |
| Database | The database being searched is constructed using ASFcrawl, which performs HTTP based traversal and indexing starting at a nominated URL. The ASF database is normally accessed via the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol, but experimental WHOIS++ access is also available. |
| Search tools/clients | The end user interacts via HTTP with an Apache module mod_zap. |
| API | The software implements the ASF framework - the components should be well-isolated with well-defined interfaces, so that they can be replaced by third-party components written to use the same interface. |
| Metadata Formats | GILS records encoded in XML are the standard metadata format. |
| Extras/Other features |
| ASF | Harvest | Index+ | Isaac |
| Metastar | ROADS | Sitesearch | Zope |