Comments on: Diagnosing federated search source problems: it’s harder than you think

By: Ian Ibbotson

Ian Ibbotson — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:06:43 +0000

I do feel this is the price we have to pay for letting the argument “Z3950 and SRU/SRW are too hard, here, let me provide you with an alternate programatic interface” win instead of making it ever easier to implement the standards the search community has agreed on.

Those well defined standards take effort to implement, but they aren’t *hard*. They take effort to implement because they define mechanisims for explicity dealing with a whole range of error conditions and edge cases like this. When a vendor comes up with a quick and dirty way to search source ‘X’ it’s seen as fair competitive advantage, and the pressure on source ‘X’ to implement a real standard is reduced. It’s really a loose-loose situation for the information network.

I think a related interesting question is what common metaphor should be used for communicating this kind of diagnostic information back to the user. It’s horribly difficult to strike a balance between the google search page people first say they want, and the interface that exposes just enough information about the federation process without getting in the way of the search task itself.

By: Lukas Koster

Lukas Koster — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:59:54 +0000

1 – There is no clear unified federated search user community platform that content owners like Pubmed can communicate with, unless they contact all known federated search tool vendors (and then they do not reach customers with home grown tools)

2 – Federated search tool vendors do not have often do not have access to all sources, so they can’t monitor all sources continuously

3 – Information by vendors through the federated search application’s search page works only for hosted customers, not for local installations

4 – The only way of continuous monitoring that really works is an active and cooperative user/customer community; per federated search tool.

By: Jakob

Jakob — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:24:18 +0000

Federated search is one example of loosely coupeled services. You should never expect anything from a service you use unless you checked it yourself. Use test cases, for instance a search that returns a know result, ping the server etc. and regularly run the tests.