[XML4Lib] New software: Pazpar2 -- XML metasearching

[Sebastian Hammer]

Guys,

It isn't every day that we release a brand-new piece of software, and
this is one we're pretty excited about. We sincerely hope you will like
it, too.

Pazpar2 (pronounced like 'passe-partout', if it please ya) can be viewed
either as a high-performance metasearching middleware or a Z39.50 client
with a webservice interface, depending on your perspective and needs. It
is a fairly compact C program -- a resident daemon -- that incorporates
the best we know how to do in terms of providing high performance,
user-oriented federated searching.

One cool thing it does is search many databases in parallel, and do it
fast, without unduly loading up the user interface.. in fact, we find it
will search more than 100 targets in parallel and 'feel' faster the more
data you throw at it. It retrieves a set of records from each target,
and performs merging, deduplication, ranking/sorting, and pulls browse
facets from them. It does it really fast, and because this functionality
is exposed through a pretty simple XML webservice, it is really easy
to build very cool, lightning-fast user interfaces on top of it --
interfaces that tend to make people go 'no WAY is that metasearching'.

It doesn't know anything about data models, so you can handle exotic
data sources if you need to.. you use XSLT to normalize data into an
internal model -- we provide examples for MARC21 and a DC-esque internal
model, and configure ranking, facets, sorting, etc., from that. Let us
know if you try other things.

More details at http://www.indexdata.com/pazpar2/

Isn't Z39.50 a little old-school? Perhaps so, but it's also widely
supported -- probably one of the most vital and viable information
retrieval standards out there today, with new servers popping up all the 
time. Most library catalogs and many of the larger, commercial databases 
support it. It is trivial to gateway SRU/W to it. You can use our 
SimpleServer to turn anything into a Z  server. If you need to do 
large-scale metasearching across non-standard resources, talk to us -- 
we have relationships and tools with traditional metasearch vendors and 
can help enable 'database connectors' for use via this tool.

It's GPL -- use it, don't abuse it. We offer the usual services and
support to people, and we encourage anyone contemplating commercial
deployment to work with us; make sure we know your needs, and help us
develop this further and keep it viable for the future. For anyone else;
have at it. We call it beta: Issues are bound to pop up when new people
play with it in different environments.. share your experiences, your
observations, etc. We can offer installation assistance, training,
support, even turnkey development and hosting.

Enjoy,

--Sebastian

-- 
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data
quinn at indexdata.com   www.indexdata.com
Ph: (603) 209-6853 Fax: (866) 383-4485