Using Query Mediators for Distributed Searching in Federated Digital Libraries

摘要

We describe an architecture and investigate the characteristics ofdistributed searching in federated digital libraries. We introduce the notionof a query mediator as a digital library service responsible for selectingamong available search engines, routing queries to those search engines, andaggregating results. We examine operational data from the NCSTRL distributeddigital library that reveals a number of characteristics of distributedresource discovery. These include availability and response time of indexersand the distinction between the query mediator view of these characteristicsand the indexer view.