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openDSM

 
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What is openDSM

openDSM is open source software developed by education.au to enable organisations to provide searches across multiple search engines and databases simultaneously.

For Information Managers

Many organisations have a number of collections of information, often provided using different technologies.  Searching through this information is usually performed by making search requests from one collection at a time.  openDSM allows you to issue a single request that is sent to each of these collections simultaneously and then have a single, consolidated set of results presented to you.

 

openDSM can be customised to meet specific user or organisation requirements.  For example, some collections may be considered more important than others.  openDSM can influence the ranking of results from 'important' collections so that results from them appear towards the top of the results.  openDSM has a number of strategies that it can draw upon to ensure that ranking and presentation of results is appropriate to its users.

 

openDSM can be easily incorporated into any website, including using the 'look and feel' of the website.

 

openDSM understands how to search a wide variety of collections that use commonly found standards in Information Management.

For Developers

openDSM is a tool developed by education.au to provide a lightweight fast search across multiple distributed education repositories (digital libraries, cultural image libraries, metadata repositories, learning object repositories).

openDSM was developed to provide high performance distributed search services to existing web sites and portals via a simple, lightweight interface.

One of the main goals of openDSM is to provide a low barrier of entry for web site developers to easily interface their websites to the openDSM service.

openDSM is a Java application, the code is available, along with further information, at http://code.google.com/p/distributed-search-manager/.

See openDSM

openDSM is being used in a number of websites.  Some of the public sites include:

There is also a demonstration version of the 'out of the box' code here.