Dear Stephen, While I don't mean to rain on your parade, I have to admit that my question was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. The library community has been trying to get meaningful ranking of federated search results to work for the better part of 10 years now. At this point, it's widely acknowledged that ranking is the Achilles heel of federated search, and even with the best technology, a limitation which can't be completely mediated. I'd say that a lot of the early enthusiasm about federated searching as the solution to integrating datasources, especially at scale, has dissipated by now. Having said that, I can see the usefulness of this kind of search for a limited number of datasources, such as library, archive, museum collections. It's a great first step to see all the content in one place!
Cheers, G?nter -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Toney [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 8:40 AM To: Waibel,Guenter Cc: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: RE: [MCN-L] MWeb Universal Hello Gunter, At present MWeb Universal sorts alphabetically by the brief name of the database, subsorted by the type of content. Ranking is a good idea and we will add it to a future release. Thanks for the suggestion! Stephen - Stephen Toney Systems Planning toney at systemsplanning.com http://systemsplanning.com MWeb, CAPS, MARCView, and MARConvert are trademarks of Systems Planning On Fri, 2009-03-13 at 11:29 -0400, Waibel,Guenter wrote: > Hi Stephen, > > How do you deal with ranking search results from various sources? > > The Baltimore example seems to side-step ranking. It displays hits segregated > by database. > > Cheers, > > G?nter > > -----Original Message----- > From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] On Behalf Of > Stephen Toney > Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 7:03 AM > To: Chuck Patch > Cc: Museum Computer Network Listserv > Subject: Re: [MCN-L] MWeb Universal > > > On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 09:57 -0400, Chuck Patch wrote: > > Hi Stephen, > > > > This is really interesting. ... looks like you are inches away from > > being able to create a PastPerfect Consortium. > > > Thanks, Chuck, > > Actually MWeb Universal can do that now. Try > http://searchbaltimore.pastperfect-online.com > to search a consortium of three Baltimore museums. > > The current release is suitable for consortia of any museums, not just > PastPerfect sites, since it can search any CMSs or databases without > exporting, FTPing or Z39.50. > > MWeb Universal has been tested with 50 databases at once. > > Thanks! > Stephen > - > Stephen Toney > Systems Planning > toney at systemsplanning.com > http://systemsplanning.com > > MWeb, CAPS, MARCView, and MARConvert are trademarks of Systems Planning > > > > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l > > The MCN-L archives can be found at: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/ > >
