 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
     
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
The IMesh Toolkit
[ Work In Hand > Technology Review > Products ]
Harvest
(Based on contributions by Martin Hamilton, accessible in this report.)
| Provider | Harvest was originally developed by the Internet
Research Taskforce Group on Resource Discovery (IRTF-RD) as part
of an ARPA-funded project (Bowman et al 1994). The final official
Harvest release (1.4pl2) forms the basis for current open source
development. Download http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/ Community support: harvest-develop@tardis.ed.ac.uk mailing list and comp.infosystems.harvest Usenet group |
|---|---|
| Licensing requirements: Open source software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. | |
| Purpose | Originally intended to be a generalised resource discovery system built in a modularised fashion, designed as an open-ended system using network protocols, programming APIs and a standard metadata format (SOIF). |
| Approach | A Gatherer component performs indexing of arbitrary content, using the Essence system from the University of Arizona (included in the package). Metadata records (in SOIF format) are produced by summarisers; the metadata records are made available by the Gatherer component; a Broker component periodically fetches SOIF records from Gatherers and indexes them. The Broker is searched either using the Harvest Broker protocol, or by plugging in search engines. The package tries to implement the modular design by reusing readily available software (such as existing indexers e.g. glimpse, the Essence system, existing HTTP servers), and Harvest is essentially the plumbing to connect these components together over a network. |
| Platform and requirements | Http server, Perl, C compiler. Runs on any modern Unix-like system. |
| Components and their technology | |
| Server | The Harvest Broker component serves this role. |
| Database | |
| Search tools/clients | User interacts via HTTP. Search is performed via a web form. A Perl CGI script (nph-search) speaks the Harvest Broker protocol to the Broker and returns HTML to the end user. |
| API | |
| Metadata Formats | Only the SOIF metadata format (originally developed for Harvest) is supported. |
| Extras/Other features | Very limited web-based administration features are provided, e.g. one can initiate a gathering operation. |
| A new version of Harvest is written entirely in Perl. | |
| See review in the Renardus report for additional comments. |
| ASF | Harvest | Index+ | Isaac |
| Metastar | ROADS | Sitesearch | Zope |