SDARTS is a protocol for metasearching over document collections.
You may consider using SDARTS if:
- You want to search (one or multiple) text or XML collections that you havefrom a single search interface.
- You want to search remote document collections that export their metadataunder the Open Archives protocol.
- You want to search multiple web-based document collections from one, single search interface.
SDARTS was developed as part of PERSIVAL (an NSF Digital Library Initiative–Phase 2 project) at the Computer Science Department of Columbia University. SDARTS is a hybrid of two previously existing protocols, STARTS and SDLIP. SDARTS is essentially an instantiation of the SDLIP protocol with a richer set of metadata, which can be effectively used for building sophisticated metasearchers. SDARTS makes a wide variety of collections with heterogeneous interfaces accessible under one uniform interface. The SDARTS toolkit provides ready-to-use, configurable wrappers. They can be used directly for wrapping locally available text and XML collections, and for wrapping web-accessible databases. The SDARTS toolkit also contains two optional sets of applications:
- The OAI SDARTS Cooperative Suite, which can makes SDARTS OAI-compliant and enables SDARTS to access OAI-compliant collections.
- We provide the SDARTS Automatic Content Summary Extraction for remote web databases, which extracts statistics about the vocabulary and the word frequencies of web databases over which SDARTS does not have immediate access.