<chapter id="introduction">
- <!-- $Id: introduction.xml,v 1.32 2006-04-25 12:26:26 marc Exp $ -->
+ <!-- $Id: introduction.xml,v 1.40 2006-09-22 12:34:45 adam Exp $ -->
<title>Introduction</title>
- <sect1>
+ <section id="overview">
<title>Overview</title>
<para>
programs and toolkits, both commercial and free, which understand
this protocol. Application libraries are available to allow
bespoke clients to be written in Perl, C, C++, Java, Tcl, Visual
- Basic, Python, PHP and more - see
- <ulink url="http://zoom.z3950.org/">the ZOOM web site</ulink>
+ Basic, Python, PHP and more - see the
+ <ulink url="&url.zoom;">ZOOM web site</ulink>
for more information on some of these client toolkits.
</para>
and how to configure the server to give you the
functionality that you need.
</para>
- </sect1>
+ </section>
- <sect1 id="features">
+ <section id="features">
<title>Features</title>
<para>
<listitem>
<para>
Zebra is written in portable C, so it runs on most Unix-like systems
- as well as Windows NT. A binary distribution for Windows NT is
- available at
- <ulink url="http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/win32/"/>,
+ as well as Windows (NT/2000/2003). A binary distribution for Windows
+ is available at
+ <ulink url="&url.idzebra.download.win32;"/>,
and pre-built packages are available for
<!--- some Linux
distributions:
and Debian packages at
-->
<literal>GNU/Debian Linux</literal> at
- <ulink url="http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/debian/"/>.
+ <ulink url="&url.idzebra.download.debian;"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
</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>
+ Extended RPN queries for search/retrieve and scan are supported,
+ for controlling approximate hit counts, etc.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
+
+ </itemizedlist>
+
+ </para>
+
- </sect1>
+ </section>
- <sect1 id="apps">
- <title>Applications</title>
+ <section 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>DADS - the DTV Article Database Service</title>
+
+ <section id="koha-ils">
+ <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>
+ <para>
+ See also LibLime's newsletter article
+ <ulink url="http://www.liblime.com/newsletter/2006/01/features/koha-earns-its-stripes/">
+ Koha Earns its Stripes</ulink>.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
+ <section id="emilda-ils">
+ <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>
+ </section>
+
+ <section id="reindex-ils">
+ <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 relational database system
+ Sybase 9 XML is used for
+ administrative data.
+ Internally MARCXML is used for bibliographical records. Update
+ utilizes Z39.50 extended services.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
+ <section id="dads-article-database">
+ <title>DADS - the DTV Article Database
+ Service</title>
+ <para>
DADS is a huge database of more than ten million records, totalling
over ten gigabytes of data. The records are metadata about academic
journal articles, primarily scientific; about 10% of these
<ulink url="http://www.dtv.dk/"/> and
<ulink url="http://dads.dtv.dk"/>
</para>
- </sect2>
+ </section>
- <sect2>
+ <section id="infonet-eprints">
<title>Infonet Eprints</title>
<para>
The InfoNet Eprints service from the
The online search facility is found at
<ulink url="http://preprints.cvt.dk"/>.
</para>
- </sect2>
+ </section>
- <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>
+ <section id="alvis-project">
+ <title>Alvis</title>
<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
+ with 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 times of fractions of
+ seconds.
+ </para>
+ </section>
+
- <sect2>
+ <section id="uls">
<title>ULS (Union List of Serials)</title>
<para>
The M25 Systems Team
More information can be found at
<ulink url="http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ULS/"/>
</para>
- </sect2>
+ </section>
+
+ <section id="nli">
+ <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>
+ </section>
- <sect2>
+ <section id="various-web-indexes">
<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:
</para>
</blockquote>
</para>
- </sect2>
- </sect1>
-
-
- <sect1 id="support">
- <title>Support</title>
- <para>
- You can get support for Zebra from at least three sources.
- </para>
- <para>
- First, there's the Zebra web site at
- <ulink url="http://indexdata.dk/zebra/"/>,
- which always has the most recent version available for download.
- If you have a problem with Zebra, the first thing to do is see
- whether it's fixed in the current release.
- </para>
- <para>
- Second, there's the Zebra mailing list. Its home page at
- <ulink url="http://lists.indexdata.dk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zebralist"/>
- includes a complete archive of all messages that have ever been
- posted on the list. The Zebra mailing list is used both for
- announcements from the authors (new
- releases, bug fixes, etc.) and general discussion. You are welcome
- to seek support there. Join by filling the form on the list home page.
- </para>
- <para>
- Third, it's possible to buy a commercial support contract, with
- well defined service levels and response times, from Index Data.
- See
- <ulink url="http://indexdata.dk/support/"/>
- for details.
- </para>
- </sect1>
+ </section>
+ </section>
+
+
+ <section id="introduction-support">
+ <title>Support</title>
+ <para>
+ You can get support for Zebra from at least three sources.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ First, there's the Zebra web site at
+ <ulink url="&url.idzebra;"/>,
+ which always has the most recent version available for download.
+ If you have a problem with Zebra, the first thing to do is see
+ whether it's fixed in the current release.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Second, there's the Zebra mailing list. Its home page at
+ <ulink url="&url.idzebra.mailinglist;"/>
+ includes a complete archive of all messages that have ever been
+ posted on the list. The Zebra mailing list is used both for
+ announcements from the authors (new
+ releases, bug fixes, etc.) and general discussion. You are welcome
+ to seek support there. Join by filling the form on the list home page.
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Third, it's possible to buy a commercial support contract, with
+ well defined service levels and response times, from Index Data.
+ See
+ <ulink url="&url.indexdata.support;"/>
+ for details.
+ </para>
+ </section>
- <sect1 id="future">
+ <section id="future">
<title>Future Directions</title>
<para>
XSLT transformations during indexing and record retrieval. Work
on this filter has been sponsored by the ALVIS EU project
<ulink url="http://www.alvis.info/alvis/"/>. We expect this filter to
- mature soon, as it is planned to be included in the version 1.4
+ mature soon, as it is planned to be included in the version 2.0
release of Zebra.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
- Access to the search engine through SOAP/RPC API to allow the
- construction of applications without requiring Z39.50 tools.
- <!--
- This will shortly be available by means of Index Data's
- <ulink url="http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/srw/">SRW</ulink>-to-Z39.50 gateway, currently in beta test.
- -->
- Experimental support of the
- Search/Retrieve Via URL ( <ulink url="http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/">SRU</ulink>)
- <ulink url="http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/"/>
- REST webservice, and the
- Search/Retrieve Web Service ( <ulink url="http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/srw/">SRW</ulink>)
- <ulink url="http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/srw/"/>
- SOAP Web Service have recently been added to the YAZ/Zebra
- combo - including server side Common Query Language (<ulink url="http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/cql/">CQL</ulink>)
- <ulink url="http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/cql/"/> parsing
- and configuration. It remains to find a sponsor for further testing,
- documentation and packaging of this exiting component.
- </para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>
Finalisation and documentation of Zebra's C programming
API, allowing updates, database management and other functions
not readily expressed in Z39.50. We will also consider
<listitem>
<para>
- Support for the use of Perl both for access to the Zebra API
- and for building extension ``plug-ins'' such as input filters.
- The code for this has been contributed to the source tree by
- Peter Popovics
- <email>pop@technomat.hu</email>,
- and is in the process of being integrated and tested.
- </para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>
Improved free-text searching. We're first and foremost octet jockeys and
we're actively looking for organisations or people who'd like
to contribute experience in relevance ranking and text
or check the contact info at the end of this manual.
</para>
- </sect1>
+ </section>
</chapter>
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