what Searchy is?
It is a difficult question, in short Searchy is a distributed Search and information integration engine with unique features. It allows you to unify access to different data sources like data bases, directories or web pages.
There are many ways in which use Searchy: it may be used like a metasearch engine to perform searches across different search systems, giving a unified view of data and APIs; it may be used to integrate data with different structures and semantics. For example, with Searchy you could integrate different SQL databases with different structures easely, and even you may integrate then with an LDAP directory.
The semantic web technologies are in the base of Searchy. RDF and OWL conform the core of data model, so Searchy may be used also to translate contents into RDF.
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Searchy is specially suited if you need to integrate legacy information systems across different organisations and you cannot use an intrusive solution.
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Searchy has been designed to perform a complex task with a minimun management complexity. This is a software easy to install and configure in a short period of time; the most difficult task for the administrator is the definition of the mapping between the local data model and the global shared model.
architecture
Searchy has a distributed nature based on the concept of agent. A typical Searchy infraestructure is composed by several cooperating agents working togheter to perform a search or data integration operation. In the following figure you can see an example of use.
Each agent may be used to publish the information in each Departament. In this way, departaments have a complete autonomy to choose their IT infraestructure meanwhile interoperatibility is granted.
| Searchy is able to integrate access to SQL databases, LDAP directories, Google API and Harvest indexer. Any other information source may be easily implemented. | |
The interface to Searchy may adquire different forms, it may be a web page or it may be used by other applications that use its information for more complex tasks. Since the interface is SOAP based Searchy clients may be developed in almost any language and arquitecture. Actually, there are support clases to access Searchy in Java, PHP and Python.
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