+ It allows students and researchers at DTU (Danmarks Tekniske
+ Universitet, the Technical College of Denmark) to find and order
+ articles from multiple databases in a single query. The database
+ contains literature on all engineering subjects. It's available
+ on-line through a web gateway, though currently only to registered
+ users.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ More information can be found at
+ <ulink url="http://www.dtv.dk/help/dads/index_e.htm"/>
+ </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>
+ <para>
+ Evaluation will take place as part of the TREC/CLEF campaign 2003
+ <ulink url="http://clef.iei.pi.cnr.it or http://www4.eurospider.ch/CLEF/"/>
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ For more information, contact Johannes Leveling
+ <email>Johannes.Leveling@FernUni-Hagen.De</email>
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+ <sect2>
+ <title>ULS (Union List of Serials)</title>
+ <para>
+ The M25 Systems Team
+ has created a union catalogue for the periodicals of the
+ twenty-one constituent libraries of the University of London and
+ the University of Westminster
+ (<ulink url="http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ULS/"/>).
+ They have achieved this using an
+ unusual architecture, which they describe as a
+ ``non-distributed virtual union catalogue''.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ The member libraries send in data files representing their
+ periodicals, including both brief bibliographic data and summary
+ holdings. Then 21 individual Z39.50 targets are created, each
+ using Zebra, and all mounted on the single hardware server.
+ The live service provides a web gateway allowing Z39.50 searching
+ of all of the targets or a selection of them. Zebra's small
+ footprint allows a relatively modest system to comfortably host
+ the 21 servers.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ More information can be found at
+ <ulink url="http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ULS/"/>
+ </para>
+ </sect2>
+
+ <sect2>
+ <title>Various web indexes</title>
+ <para>
+ Zebra has been used by a variety of institutions to construct
+ indexes of large web sites, typically in the region of tens of
+ millions of pages. In this role, it functions somewhat similarly
+ to the engine of google or altavista, but for a selected intranet
+ or a subset of the whole Web.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ For example, Liverpool University's web-search facility (see on
+ the home page at
+ <ulink url="http://www.liv.ac.uk/"/>
+ and many sub-pages) works by relevance-searching a Zebra database
+ which is populated by the Harvest-NG web-crawling software.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ For more information on Liverpool university's intranet search
+ architecture, contact John Gilbertson
+ <email>jgilbert@liverpool.ac.uk</email>
+ </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:
+ <blockquote>
+ <para>
+ The first results after some testing with Zebra are very
+ promising. The tests were done with around 220,000 SOIF files,
+ which occupies 1.6GB of disk space.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Building the index from scratch takes around one hour with Zebra
+ where [old-engine] needs around five hours. While [old-engine]
+ blocks search requests when updating its index, Zebra can still
+ answer search requests.
+ [...]
+ Zebra supports incremental indexing which will speed up indexing
+ even further.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ While the search time of [old-engine] varies from some seconds
+ to some minutes depending how expensive the query is, Zebra
+ usually takes around one to three seconds, even for expensive
+ queries.
+ [...]
+ Zebra can search more than 100 times faster than [old-engine]
+ and can process multiple search requests simultaneously
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ I am very happy to see such nice software available under GPL.
+ </para>
+ </blockquote>