|
|
The IMesh Toolkit
[ Work In Hand > Technology Review > Products ]
The Isaac Network
Based on review by Martin Hamilton.
| Provider |
The Isaac Network was an initiative of the Internet Scout
Project (funded by the US National Science Foundation) at the
Department of Computer Science at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Although the Isaac software was never formally
released, a number of architecture overview papers were published
- these are used as the basis for this review. The software is
not publicly available. |
| Purpose |
To provide search and retrieval capabilities including
cross-searching of multiple Isaac nodes. Records to be created by
human cataloguers - possibly with automated assistance. Isaac
supports three distinct services:
- Metadata repository-provides storage for metadata records,
which may be fetched by other Isaac nodes.
- Index service - gathers metadata from repositories, indexes
it, and makes it available for searching.
- Search service - provides a Web-based front end for searching
multiple index services.
The metadata repository is also responsible for generating Common
Indexing Protocol Tagged Index Objects of the data it holds. |
| Approach |
Isaac uses LDAP as its search and retrieval protocol and the
Common Indexing Protocol is used to provide distributed indexing
and searching. The core functionality of the Isaac software is
provided by already- written third party software - in this case
the University of Michigan LDAP distribution. The Isaac
developers have extended this to support some of the LDAP v3
functionality and implemented the Common Indexing Protocol
separately using Perl. |
| Platform and requirements |
Several modern Unix-like systems, including Solaris, FreeBSD
and Linux.
HTTP server for search server. |
| Components and their
technology |
|
| Server |
|
| Database |
The LDAP server acts as the metadata repository. |
| Search tools/clients |
|
| API |
|
| Metadata Formats |
Metadata records in Isaac may be interchanged using the LDAP
Interchange Format (LDIF). Internally the LDAP schema used is the
Dublin Core LDAP/X500 draft proposed by Martin Hamilton in
1996. |
| References |
Lukas, C., Roszkowski, M., 1999 The Isaac Network:LDAP and
Distributed Metadata for Resources Discovery. Paper presented at
the Third IEEE Meta-Data Conference, Bethesda, Md, 6-7 April
1999.
http://computer.org/proceedings/meta/1999/papers/46/clukas.html
Roszkowski, M., Lukas, C., 1998, A Distributed Architecture
for Resource Discovery Using Metadata. D-Lib Magazine,
September.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june98/scout/06roszkowski.html
|
|
