<chapter id="introduction">
- <!-- $Id: introduction.xml,v 1.44 2007-02-02 14:34:20 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>
code is open to anybody to read and change under the GPL license.
</para>
<para>
- &zebra; is a networked component which acts as a reliable &z3950; server
+ &zebra; is a networked component which acts as a
+ 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>
-->
- <table id="table-features-protocol" frame="top">
- <title>&zebra; networked protocols</title>
+ <section id="features-document">
+ <title>&zebra; Document Model</title>
+
+ <table id="table-features-document" frame="top">
+ <title>&zebra; document model</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
</thead>
<tbody>
<row>
- <entry>Operation types</entry>
- <entry> &z3950;/&sru; explain, search, and scan</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend="querymodel-operation-types"/></entry>
- </row>
- <row>
- <entry>Remote update</entry>
- <entry>&z3950; extended services</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Complex semi-structured Documents</entry>
+ <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>&z3950;</entry>
- <entry>&z3950; protocol support</entry>
- <entry> Protocol facilities: Init, Search, Present (retrieval),
- 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. Piggy-backed presents are honored in the search
- request. Named result sets are supported.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Input document formats</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.
+ &acro.sgml;, &acro.xml;, ISO2709 (&acro.marc;), and raw text are also
+ supported.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="componentmodules"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>Web Service support</entry>
- <entry>&sru_gps;</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; conversion is supported. Extended RPN queries
- for search/retrieve and scan are supported.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Document storage</entry>
+ <entry>Index-only, Key storage, Document storage</entry>
+ <entry>Data can be, and usually is, imported
+ into &zebra;'s own storage, but &zebra; can also refer to
+ external files, building and maintaining indexes of "live"
+ collections.</entry>
+ <entry></entry>
</row>
+
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
+ </section>
+ <section id="features-search">
+ <title>&zebra; Search Features</title>
<table id="table-features-search" frame="top">
<title>&zebra; search functionality</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
<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><xref linkend="querymodel-query-languages-pqf"/>
+ <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=""/></entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="querymodel-atomic-queries"/>,
+ <xref linkend="querymodel-use-string"/>,
+ <xref linkend="querymodel-bib1-use"/>, and
+ <xref linkend="querymodel-idxpath-use"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Data normalization</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry>Data normalization, text tokenization and character mappings can be
- applied during indexing and searching</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>user defined</entry>
+ <entry>Data normalization, text tokenization and character
+ mappings can be applied during indexing and searching</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="fields-and-charsets"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Predefined field types</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry>Data fields can be indexed as phrase, as into word tokenized text,
- as numeric values, url's, dates, and raw binary data.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>user defined</entry>
+ <entry>Data fields can be indexed as phrase, as into word
+ 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>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Regular expression matching</entry>
- <entry>Regexp </entry>
+ <entry>available</entry>
<entry>Full regular expression matching and "approximate
- matching" (eg. spelling mistake corrections) are handled.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ matching" (e.g. spelling mistake corrections) are handled.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="querymodel-regular"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>Search truncation</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Term truncation</entry>
+ <entry>left, right, left-and-right</entry>
+ <entry>The truncation attribute specifies whether variations of
+ one or more characters are allowed between search term and hit
+ terms, or not. Using non-default truncation attributes will
+ broaden the document hit set of a search query.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="querymodel-bib1-truncation"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Fuzzy searches</entry>
- <entry></entry>
+ <entry>Spelling correction</entry>
<entry>In addition, fuzzy searches are implemented, where one
spelling mistake in search terms is matched</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="querymodel-bib1-truncation"/></entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
+ </section>
+ <section id="features-scan">
+ <title>&zebra; Index Scanning</title>
<table id="table-features-scan" frame="top">
<title>&zebra; index scanning</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry>Scan</entry>
- <entry>yes</entry>
+ <entry>term suggestions</entry>
<entry><literal>Scan</literal> on a given named index returns all the
- indexed terms in lexicographical order near the given start term.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ indexed terms in lexicographical order near the given start
+ term. This can be used to create drop-down menus and search
+ suggestions.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="querymodel-operation-type-scan"/> and
+ <xref linkend="querymodel-atomic-queries"/>
+ </entry>
</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><xref linkend=""/></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>Drill-down or refine-search</entry>
<entry>partially</entry>
<entry>scanning in result sets can be used to implement
drill-down in search clients</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-attr-scan"/></entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
+ </section>
+ <section id="features-presentation">
+ <title>&zebra; Document Presentation</title>
<table id="table-features-presentation" frame="top">
<title>&zebra; document presentation</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
<entry>Search results include at any time the total hit count of a given
query, either exact computed, or approximative, in case that the
hit count exceeds a possible pre-defined hit set truncation
- level.
-</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ level.</entry>
+ <entry>
+ <xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-local-attr-limit"/> and
+ <xref linkend="zebra-cfg"/>
+ </entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Paged result sets</entry>
<entry>yes</entry>
- <entry>Paging of search requests and present/display request can return any
- successive number of records from any start position in the hit set,
- i.e. it is trivial to provide search results in successive pages of
- any size.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Paging of search requests and present/display request
+ can return any successive number of records from any start
+ position in the hit set, i.e. it is trivial to provide search
+ results in successive pages of any size.</entry>
+ <entry></entry>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>&xml;ocument transformations</entry>
- <entry>&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
+ <entry>&acro.xml; document transformations</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.xslt; based</entry>
+ <entry> Record presentation can be performed in many
+ 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=""/></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>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
</row>
<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 record syntaxes
- and schemas on the fly.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ 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>
+ <row>
+ <entry>&zebra; internal metadata</entry>
+ <entry>yes</entry>
+ <entry> &zebra; internal document metadata can be fetched in
+ &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes. Those are useful in client
+ applications.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
+ </row>
+ <row>
+ <entry>&zebra; internal raw record data</entry>
+ <entry>yes</entry>
+ <entry> &zebra; internal raw, binary record data can be fetched in
+ &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes, leveraging %zebra; to a
+ binary storage system</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
+ </row>
+ <row>
+ <entry>&zebra; internal record field data</entry>
+ <entry>yes</entry>
+ <entry> &zebra; internal record field data can be fetched in
+ &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes. This makes very fast minimal
+ record data displays possible.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
+ </section>
+ <section id="features-sort-rank">
+ <title>&zebra; Sorting and Ranking</title>
<table id="table-features-sort-rank" frame="top">
<title>&zebra; sorting and ranking</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
<entry>Sort</entry>
<entry>numeric, lexicographic</entry>
<entry>Sorting on the basis of alpha-numeric and numeric data
- is supported. Alphanumeric sorts can be configured for different data encodings
- and locales for European languages. </entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ is supported. Alphanumeric sorts can be configured for
+ different data encodings and locales for European languages.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-sorting"/> and
+ <xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-attr-sorting"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Combined sorting</entry>
<entry>Sorting on the basis of combined sorts e.g. combinations of
ascending/descending sorts of lexicographical/numeric/date field data
is supported</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-sorting"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Relevance ranking</entry>
<entry>TF-IDF like</entry>
<entry>Relevance-ranking of free-text queries is supported
using a TF-IDF like algorithm.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-dynamic"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>Relevence ranking</entry>
- <entry>TDF-IDF like</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Static pre-ranking</entry>
+ <entry>yes</entry>
+ <entry>Enables pre-index time ranking of documents where hit
+ lists are ordered first by ascending static rank, then by
+ ascending document ID.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-static"/></entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
+ </section>
+ <section id="features-updates">
+ <title>&zebra; Live Updates</title>
- <table id="table-features-document" frame="top">
- <title>&zebra; document model</title>
+
+ <table id="table-features-updates" frame="top">
+ <title>&zebra; live updates</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
</thead>
<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
- representation allowing for complex indexing and display rules</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Incremental and batch updates</entry>
+ <entry></entry>
+ <entry>It is possible to schedule record inserts/updates/deletes in any
+ quantity, from single individual handled records to batch updates
+ in strikes of any size, as well as total re-indexing of all records
+ from file system. </entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="zebraidx"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>Input document formats</entry>
- <entry>&xml;, &sgml;, Text, ISO2709 (&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
- supported.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Remote updates</entry>
+ <entry>&acro.z3950; extended services</entry>
+ <entry>Updates can be performed from remote locations using the
+ &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>
</row>
<row>
- <entry>Document storage</entry>
- <entry>Index-only, Key storage, Document storage</entry>
- <entry>Data can be, and usually is, imported
- into &zebra;'s own storage, but &zebra; can also refer to
- external files, building and maintaining indexes of "live"
- collections.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>Live updates</entry>
+ <entry>transaction based</entry>
+ <entry> Data updates are transaction based and can be performed
+ on running &zebra; systems. Full searchability is preserved
+ during life data update due to use of shadow disk areas for
+ update operations. Multiple update transactions at the same
+ time are lined up, to be performed one after each other. Data
+ integrity is preserved.</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="shadow-registers"/></entry>
</row>
-
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
+ </section>
+ <section id="features-protocol">
+ <title>&zebra; Networked Protocols</title>
+ <table id="table-features-protocol" frame="top">
+ <title>&zebra; networked protocols</title>
+ <tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
+ <thead>
+ <row>
+ <entry>Feature</entry>
+ <entry>Availability</entry>
+ <entry>Notes</entry>
+ <entry>Reference</entry>
+ </row>
+ </thead>
+ <tbody>
+ <row>
+ <entry>Fundamental operations</entry>
+ <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>&acro.z3950; protocol support</entry>
+ <entry>yes</entry>
+ <entry> Protocol facilities supported are:
+ <literal>init</literal>, <literal>search</literal>,
+ <literal>present</literal> (retrieval),
+ Segmentation (support for very large records),
+ <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 &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>&acro.sru;</entry>
+ <entry> The protocol operations <literal>explain</literal>,
+ <literal>searchRetrieve</literal> and <literal>scan</literal>
+ 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>
+ </row>
+ </tbody>
+ </tgroup>
+ </table>
+ </section>
+
+ <section id="features-scalability">
+ <title>&zebra; Data Size and Scalability</title>
<table id="table-features-scalability" frame="top">
<title>&zebra; data size and scalability</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
<entry>No of records</entry>
<entry>40-60 million</entry>
<entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Data size</entry>
<entry>100 GB of record data</entry>
+ <entry>&zebra; based applications have successfully indexed up
+ to 100 GB of record data</entry>
<entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
- </row>
- <row>
- <entry>File pointers</entry>
- <entry>64 bit</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Scale out</entry>
<entry>multiple discs</entry>
<entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Performance</entry>
where <literal>N</literal> is the total database size, and by
<literal>O(n)</literal>, where <literal>n</literal> is the
specific query hit set size.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Average search times</entry>
provided that the boolean queries are constructed sufficiently
precise to result in hit sets of the order of 1000 to 5.000
documents.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Large databases</entry>
+ <entry>64 bit file pointers</entry>
<entry>64 file pointers assure that register files can extend
the 2 GB limit. Logical files can be
automatically partitioned over multiple disks, thus allowing for
large databases.</entry>
<entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
+ </section>
-
- <table id="table-features-updates" frame="top">
- <title>&zebra; live updates</title>
- <tgroup cols="4">
- <thead>
- <row>
- <entry>Feature</entry>
- <entry>Availability</entry>
- <entry>Notes</entry>
- <entry>Reference</entry>
- </row>
- </thead>
- <tbody>
- <row>
- <entry>Batch updates</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry>It is possible to schedule record inserts/updates/deletes in any
- quantity, from single individual handled records to batch updates
- in strikes of any size, as well as total re-indexing of all records
- from file system. </entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
- </row>
- <row>
- <entry>Incremental updates</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
- </row>
- <row>
- <entry>Remote updates</entry>
- <entry>&z3950; extended services</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
- </row>
- <row>
- <entry>Live updates</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry> Data updates are transaction based and can be performed on running
- &zebra; systems. Full searchability is preserved during life data update due to use
- of shadow disk areas for update operations. Multiple update transactions at the same time are lined up, to be
- performed one after each other. Data integrity is preserved.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
- </row>
- <row>
- <entry>Database updates</entry>
- <entry>live, incremental updates</entry>
- <entry>Robust updating - records can be added and deleted ``on the fly''
- without rebuilding the index from scratch.
- Records can be safely updated even while users are accessing
- the server.
- The update procedure is tolerant to crashes or hard interrupts
- during database updating - data can be reconstructed following
- a crash.</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
- </row>
- </tbody>
- </tgroup>
- </table>
+ <section id="features-platforms">
+ <title>&zebra; Supported Platforms</title>
<table id="table-features-platforms" frame="top">
<title>&zebra; supported platforms</title>
<tgroup cols="4">
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
+ <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
<thead>
<row>
<entry>Feature</entry>
<row>
<entry>Linux</entry>
<entry></entry>
- <entry>GNU Linux (32 and 64bit), journaling Reiser or (better) JFS filesystem
- on disks. GNU/Debian Linux packages are available</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>GNU Linux (32 and 64bit), journaling Reiser or (better)
+ JFS file system
+ on disks. NFS file systems are not supported.
+ GNU/Debian Linux packages are available</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="installation-debian"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Unix</entry>
- <entry>tarball</entry>
- <entry>Usual tarball install possible on many major Unix systems</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>tar-ball</entry>
+ <entry>&zebra; is written in portable C, so it runs on most
+ Unix-like systems.
+ Usual tar-ball install possible on many major Unix systems</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="installation-unix"/></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry>Windows</entry>
- <entry></entry>
- <entry>Windows installer packages available</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
- </row>
- <row>
- <entry>Supported Platforms</entry>
- <entry>UNIX, Linux, Windows (NT/2000/2003/XP)</entry>
- <entry>&zebra; is written in portable C, so it runs on most
- Unix-like systems as well as Windows (NT/2000/2003/XP). Binary
- distributions are
- available for GNU/Debian Linux and Windows</entry>
- <entry><xref linkend=""/></entry>
+ <entry>NT/2000/2003/XP</entry>
+ <entry>&zebra; runs as well on Windows (NT/2000/2003/XP).
+ Windows installer packages available</entry>
+ <entry><xref linkend="installation-win32"/></entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
-
+ </section>
</section>
<para>
&zebra; has been deployed in numerous applications, in both the
academic and commercial worlds, in application domains as diverse
- as bibliographic catalogues, geospatial information, structured
+ as bibliographic catalogues, Geo-spatial information, structured
vocabulary browsing, government information locators, civic
information systems, environmental observations, museum information
and web indexes.
</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>
-
-
- <section id="future">
- <title>Future Directions</title>
-
- <para>
- These are some of the plans that we have for the software in the near
- and far future, ordered approximately as we expect to work on them.
- </para>
-
- <para>
- <itemizedlist>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>
- Improved support for &xml; in search and retrieval. Eventually,
- the goal is for &zebra; to pull double duty as a flexible
- information retrieval engine and high-performance &xml;
- repository. The recent addition of XPath searching is one
- example of the kind of enhancement we're working on.
- </para>
- <para>
- There is also the experimental <literal>ALVIS &xslt;</literal>
- &xml; input filter, which unleashes the full power of &dom; based
- &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 2.0
- release of &zebra;.
- </para>
- </listitem>
-
- <listitem>
- <para>
- Finalisation and documentation of &zebra;'s C programming
- &api;, allowing updates, database management and other functions
- not readily expressed in &z3950;. We will also consider
- exposing the &api; through &soap;.
- </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
- searching.
- </para>
- </listitem>
-
- </itemizedlist>
- </para>
-
- <para>
- Programmers thrive on user feedback. If you are interested in a
- facility that you don't see mentioned here, or if there's something
- you think we could do better, please drop us a mail. Better still,
- implement it and send us the patches.
- </para>
- <para>
- If you think it's all really neat, you're welcome to drop us a line
- saying that, too. You can email us on
- <email>info@indexdata.dk</email>
- or check the contact info at the end of this manual.
- </para>
-
- </section>
</chapter>
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