Hi, An approach we take with the Kete app is to have each instance have an OpenSearch interface available (i.e. search results can be obtained in RSS/Atom form from a URL that contains the search terms) and then allow each instance to return its own search results in a main results area with a side bar of "external search sources". It's intuitive, works with other services as well (http://digitalnz.org, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) rather than just Kete, and breaks down silos of information.
Here's an example of what it looks like in practice: http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/en/site/search/topics/for/levin+fire+brigade?search_terms=levin+fire+brigade -- external searches under "more resources" Here's a paper that describes the approach: http://kete.net.nz/site/documents/show/65-kete-and-koha-integration-built-on-open-standards -- (click 'view' to download) Or you can check out the slides from a presentation I did at KohaCon10 of the paper: http://kete.net.nz/site/documents/show/66-kohacon10-kete-and-koha-integration-built-on-open-standards Finally, there is some example code (a Ruby on Rails engine, so only good as example code): https://github.com/kete/external_search_sources/blob/master/README.rdoc It has an admin interface for setting up your external search sources and then provides some helpers that take search terms and return the parsed and laid out results. If you end up with many search sources, consider aggregating them, much as we use the Digital New Zealand service. For that we use each Kete's OAI-PMH repository to grab all public metadata (i.e. all public text) in Dublin Core about the Kete instances records so that DigitalNZ's OAI-PMH harvester can feed its Solr instance. Cheers, Walter ----------------------------------------------------------------- Walter McGinnis Kete Project Lead (http://kete.net.nz) Katipo Communications, Ltd. (http://katipo.co.nz) http://twitter.com/wtem [email protected] +64211241794 On Mar 22, 2011, at 3:49 AM, Tod wrote: > I'm working with a group that has customized their mediawiki > installation so that they can create multiple wiki instances, each with > their own database, that have no knowledge of each others existence. > This was done for security and privacy reasons. > > They now would like to be able to search a number of these multiple wiki > instances from within one newly defined wiki. I'm thinking the method > they are attempting may be as simple as creating a wiki home page with > links to each of the wikis they would like to search. > > Is this possible? Is the wiki search driven by a crawler that would > follow the links on that new wiki home page? If not, is there an > approach I could follow to be able to provide search capability against > a select number of these individual wikis under one umbrella? > > Thanks for any suggestions! > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
