<chapter id="introduction">
- <!-- $Id: introduction.xml,v 1.49 2007-02-05 14:32:31 marc Exp $ -->
<title>Introduction</title>
<section id="overview">
<para>
&zebra; is a free, fast, friendly information management system. It can
- index records in &xml;/&sgml;, &marc;, e-mail archives and many other
+ index records in &acro.xml;/&acro.sgml;, &acro.marc;, e-mail archives and many other
formats, and quickly find them using a combination of boolean
searching and relevance ranking. Search-and-retrieve applications can
- be written using &api;s in a wide variety of languages, communicating
+ be written using &acro.api;s in a wide variety of languages, communicating
with the &zebra; server using industry-standard information-retrieval
protocols or web services.
</para>
</para>
<para>
&zebra; is a networked component which acts as a
- reliable &z3950; server
+ reliable &acro.z3950; server
for both record/document search, presentation, insert, update and
- delete operations. In addition, it understands the &sru; family of
- webservices, which exist in &rest; &get;/&post; and truly
- &soap; flavors.
+ delete operations. In addition, it understands the &acro.sru; family of
+ webservices, which exist in &acro.rest; &acro.get;/&acro.post; and truly
+ &acro.soap; flavors.
</para>
<para>
&zebra; is available as MS Windows 2003 Server (32 bit) self-extracting
<ulink url="http://indexdata.dk/zebra/">&zebra;</ulink>
is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text
indexing and retrieval engine. It reads records in a
- variety of input formats (eg. email, &xml;, &marc;) and provides access
+ variety of input formats (e.g. email, &acro.xml;, &acro.marc;) and provides access
to them through a powerful combination of boolean search
expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.
</para>
&zebra; supports large databases (tens of millions of records,
tens of gigabytes of data). It allows safe, incremental
database updates on live systems. Because &zebra; supports
- the industry-standard information retrieval protocol, &z3950;,
+ the industry-standard information retrieval protocol, &acro.z3950;,
you can search &zebra; databases using an enormous variety of
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 the
- <ulink url="&url.zoom;">&zoom; web site</ulink>
+ Basic, Python, &acro.php; and more - see the
+ <ulink url="&url.zoom;">&acro.zoom; web site</ulink>
for more information on some of these client toolkits.
</para>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry>Complex semi-structured Documents</entry>
- <entry>&xml; and &grs1; Documents</entry>
- <entry>Both &xml; and &grs1; documents exhibit a &dom; like internal
+ <entry>&acro.xml; and &acro.grs1; Documents</entry>
+ <entry>Both &acro.xml; and &acro.grs1; documents exhibit a &acro.dom; like internal
representation allowing for complex indexing and display rules</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="record-model-alvisxslt"/> and
<xref linkend="grs"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Input document formats</entry>
- <entry>&xml;, &sgml;, Text, ISO2709 (&marc;)</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.xml;, &acro.sgml;, Text, ISO2709 (&acro.marc;)</entry>
<entry>
A system of input filters driven by
regular expressions allows most ASCII-based
data formats to be easily processed.
- &sgml;, &xml;, ISO2709 (&marc;), and raw text are also
+ &acro.sgml;, &acro.xml;, ISO2709 (&acro.marc;), and raw text are also
supported.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="componentmodules"/></entry>
</row>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry>Query languages</entry>
- <entry>&cql; and &rpn;/&pqf;</entry>
- <entry>The type-1 Reverse Polish Notation (&rpn;)
- and it's textual representation Prefix Query Format (&pqf;) are
- supported. The Common Query Language (&cql;) can be configured as
- a mapping from &cql; to &rpn;/&pqf;</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.cql; and &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf;</entry>
+ <entry>The type-1 Reverse Polish Notation (&acro.rpn;)
+ and its textual representation Prefix Query Format (&acro.pqf;) are
+ supported. The Common Query Language (&acro.cql;) can be configured as
+ a mapping from &acro.cql; to &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf;</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-query-languages-pqf"/> and
<xref linkend="querymodel-cql-to-pqf"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Complex boolean query tree</entry>
- <entry>&cql; and &rpn;/&pqf;</entry>
- <entry>Both &cql; and &rpn;/&pqf; allow atomic query parts (&apt;) to
+ <entry>&acro.cql; and &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf;</entry>
+ <entry>Both &acro.cql; and &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf; allow atomic query parts (&acro.apt;) to
be combined into complex boolean query trees</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-rpn-tree"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Field search</entry>
<entry>user defined</entry>
- <entry>Atomic query parts (&apt;) are either general, or
+ <entry>Atomic query parts (&acro.apt;) are either general, or
directed at user-specified document fields
</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-atomic-queries"/>,
<entry>Predefined field types</entry>
<entry>user defined</entry>
<entry>Data fields can be indexed as phrase, as into word
- tokenized text, as numeric values, url's, dates, and raw binary
+ tokenized text, as numeric values, URLs, dates, and raw binary
data.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="character-map-files"/> and
<xref linkend="querymodel-pqf-apt-mapping-structuretype"/>
<entry>Regular expression matching</entry>
<entry>available</entry>
<entry>Full regular expression matching and "approximate
- matching" (eg. spelling mistake corrections) are handled.</entry>
+ matching" (e.g. spelling mistake corrections) are handled.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-regular"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Facetted browsing</entry>
- <entry>partial</entry>
- <entry>&zebra; supports <literal>scan inside a hit
- set</literal> from a previous search, thus reducing the listed
- terms to the
- subset of terms found in the documents/records of the hit
- set.</entry>
+ <entry>available</entry>
+ <entry>Zebra 2.1 and allows retrieval of facets for
+ a result set.
+ </entry>
<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-attr-scan"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry></entry>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>&xml; document transformations</entry>
- <entry>&xslt; based</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.xml; document transformations</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.xslt; based</entry>
<entry> Record presentation can be performed in many
- pre-defined &xml; data
- formats, where the original &xml; records are on-the-fly transformed
- through any preconfigured &xslt; transformation. It is therefore
- trivial to present records in short/full &xml; views, transforming to
- RSS, Dublin Core, or other &xml; based data formats, or transform
+ pre-defined &acro.xml; data
+ formats, where the original &acro.xml; records are on-the-fly transformed
+ through any preconfigured &acro.xslt; transformation. It is therefore
+ trivial to present records in short/full &acro.xml; views, transforming to
+ RSS, Dublin Core, or other &acro.xml; based data formats, or transform
records to XHTML snippets ready for inserting in XHTML pages.</entry>
<entry>
<xref linkend="record-model-alvisxslt-elementset"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Binary record transformations</entry>
- <entry>&marc;, &usmarc;, &marc21; and &marcxml;</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.marc;, &acro.usmarc;, &acro.marc21; and &acro.marcxml;</entry>
<entry>post-filter record transformations</entry>
<entry></entry>
</row>
<entry>Record Syntaxes</entry>
<entry></entry>
<entry> Multiple record syntaxes
- for data retrieval: &grs1;, &sutrs;,
- &xml;, ISO2709 (&marc;), etc. Records can be mapped between
+ for data retrieval: &acro.grs1;, &acro.sutrs;,
+ &acro.xml;, ISO2709 (&acro.marc;), etc. Records can be mapped between
record syntaxes and schemas on the fly.</entry>
<entry></entry>
</row>
<entry>&zebra; internal metadata</entry>
<entry>yes</entry>
<entry> &zebra; internal document metadata can be fetched in
- &sutrs; and &xml; record syntaxes. Those are useful in client
+ &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes. Those are useful in client
applications.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
</row>
<entry>&zebra; internal raw record data</entry>
<entry>yes</entry>
<entry> &zebra; internal raw, binary record data can be fetched in
- &sutrs; and &xml; record syntaxes, leveraging %zebra; to a
+ &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes, leveraging %zebra; to a
binary storage system</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
</row>
<entry>&zebra; internal record field data</entry>
<entry>yes</entry>
<entry> &zebra; internal record field data can be fetched in
- &sutrs; and &xml; record syntaxes. This makes very fast minimal
+ &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes. This makes very fast minimal
record data displays possible.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
</row>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Remote updates</entry>
- <entry>&z3950; extended services</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.z3950; extended services</entry>
<entry>Updates can be performed from remote locations using the
- &z3950; extended services. Access to extended services can be
+ &acro.z3950; extended services. Access to extended services can be
login-password protected.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="administration-extended-services"/> and
<xref linkend="zebra-cfg"/></entry>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry>Fundamental operations</entry>
- <entry>&z3950;/&sru; <literal>explain</literal>,
+ <entry>&acro.z3950;/&acro.sru; <literal>explain</literal>,
<literal>search</literal>, <literal>scan</literal>, and
<literal>update</literal></entry>
<entry></entry>
<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-operation-types"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>&z3950; protocol support</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.z3950; protocol support</entry>
<entry>yes</entry>
<entry> Protocol facilities supported are:
<literal>init</literal>, <literal>search</literal>,
<literal>delete</literal>, <literal>scan</literal>
(index browsing), <literal>sort</literal>,
<literal>close</literal> and support for the <literal>update</literal>
- Extended Service to add or replace an existing &xml;
+ Extended Service to add or replace an existing &acro.xml;
record. Piggy-backed presents are honored in the search
request. Named result sets are supported.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="protocol-support"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Web Service support</entry>
- <entry>&sru_gps;</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.sru;</entry>
<entry> The protocol operations <literal>explain</literal>,
<literal>searchRetrieve</literal> and <literal>scan</literal>
- are supported. <ulink url="&url.cql;">&cql;</ulink> to internal
- query model &rpn;
+ are supported. <ulink url="&url.cql;">&acro.cql;</ulink> to internal
+ query model &acro.rpn;
conversion is supported. Extended RPN queries
for search/retrieve and scan are supported.</entry>
<entry><xref linkend="zebrasrv-sru-support"/></entry>
</para>
<para>
In early 2005, the Koha project development team began looking at
- ways to improve &marc; support and overcome scalability limitations
+ ways to improve &acro.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
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 &z3950;
+ management. Finally, since &zebra; has at its heart the &acro.z3950;
protocol, it greatly improves Koha's support for that critical
library standard."
</para>
</para>
</section>
- <section id="emilda-ils">
- <title>Emilda open source ILS</title>
+
+ <section id="kete-dom">
+ <title>Kete Open Source Digital Library and Archiving software</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.
+ <ulink url="http://kete.net.nz/">Kete</ulink> is a digital object
+ management repository, initially developed in
+ New Zealand. Initial development has
+ been a partnership between the Horowhenua Library Trust and
+ Katipo Communications Ltd. funded as part of the Community
+ Partnership Fund in 2006.
+ Kete is purpose built
+ software to enable communities to build their own digital
+ libraries, archives and repositories.
</para>
<para>
- As a surplus, 100% &marc; compatibility has been achieved using the
- &zebra; Server from Index Data as backend server.
- </para>
+ It is based on Ruby-on-Rails and MySQL, and integrates the &zebra; server
+ and the &yaz; toolkit for indexing and retrieval of it's content.
+ Zebra is run as separate computer process from the Kete
+ application.
+ See
+ how Kete <ulink
+ url="http://kete.net.nz/documentation/topics/show/139-managing-zebra">manages
+ Zebra.</ulink>
+ </para>
+ <para>
+ Why does Kete wants to use Zebra?? Speed, Scalability and easy
+ integration with Koha. Read their
+ <ulink
+ url="http://kete.net.nz/blog/topics/show/44-who-what-why-when-answering-some-of-the-niggly-development-questions">detailed
+ reasoning here.</ulink>
+ </para>
</section>
<section id="reindex-ils">
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 &z3950;.
- updates. Reindex supports &marc21;, dan&marc; eller Dublin Core with
+ based on standards such as &acro.xml; and &acro.z3950;.
+ updates. Reindex supports &acro.marc21;, dan&acro.marc; 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
+ Sybase 9 &acro.xml; is used for
administrative data.
- Internally &marcxml; is used for bibliographical records. Update
- utilizes &z3950; extended services.
+ Internally &acro.marcxml; is used for bibliographical records. Update
+ utilizes &acro.z3950; extended services.
</para>
</section>
</para>
<para>
More information can be found at
- <ulink url="http://www.dtv.dk/"/> and
+ <ulink url="http://www.dtic.dtu.dk/"/> and
<ulink url="http://dads.dtv.dk"/>
</para>
</section>
- <section id="infonet-eprints">
- <title>Infonet Eprints</title>
- <para>
- The InfoNet Eprints service from the
- <ulink url="http://www.dtv.dk/">
- Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark</ulink>
- provides access to documents stored in
- eprint/preprint servers and institutional research archives around
- the world. The service is based on Open Archives Initiative metadata
- harvesting of selected scientific archives around the world. These
- open archives offer free and unrestricted access to their contents.
- </para>
- <para>
- Infonet Eprints currently holds 1.4 million records from 16 archives.
- The online search facility is found at
- <ulink url="http://preprints.cvt.dk"/>.
- </para>
- </section>
-
- <section id="alvis-project">
- <title>Alvis</title>
- <para>
- 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>
-
-
<section id="uls">
<title>ULS (Union List of Serials)</title>
<para>
<para>
The member libraries send in data files representing their
periodicals, including both brief bibliographic data and summary
- holdings. Then 21 individual &z3950; targets are created, each
+ holdings. Then 21 individual &acro.z3950; targets are created, each
using &zebra;, and all mounted on the single hardware server.
- The live service provides a web gateway allowing &z3950; searching
+ The live service provides a web gateway allowing &acro.z3950; 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>
</section>
- <section id="nli">
- <title>NLI-&z3950; - 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>
-
<section id="various-web-indexes">
<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
+ to the engine of Google or AltaVista, but for a selected intranet
or a subset of the whole Web.
</para>
<para>
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>
</chapter>
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