A Regional Distributed WWW Search and Indexing Service - the DESIRE Way

In an attempt to implement a regional search engine we have created an open, metadata aware system for distributed, collaborative WWW-indexing. The system has three main components: a harvester (for collecting information), a database (for making the collection searchable), and a user interface (for making the information available). All components can be distributed across networked computers, thus supporting scalability. The system is metadata aware and thus allows searches on several fields including title, document author, and URL. Nordic Web Index (NWI) is an application using this system to create a regional Nordic Web-indexing service. NWI is built using five collaborating service points within the Nordic countries. The NWI databases can be used to build additional services. Services today include special metadata databases, multimedia databases, and statistics about the Nordic Web.