Digital Library Federation Forum, April 12, 2006
Unbundling the ILS: Deploying an e-commerce catalog search solution
Endeca ProFind Overview
Raw MARC data
NCSU exports and reformats
Flat text files
Data Foundry
Parse text files
Indices
Navigation Engine
NCSU Web Application
HTTP
Client browser
HTTP
Endeca ProFind
Non-library software (Endeca) doesn’t understand MARC records. Export and use MARC4J java API to transform to flat text file(s) for ingest by Endeca. Since we’re exporting records, we also have to keep these text files up to date with daily changes in Unicorn. Perform nightly updates – merge text files using Perl. That’s where Endeca’s ProFind software takes over.
It’s responsible for…
Parsing reformatted NCSU data [data foundry] and creating proprietary indices
Creating an HTTP service that responds to queries with result sets. [navigation engine]
On the front NCSU is responsible for…
Building the web application that users see – this application uses Endeca API to query the back-end HTTP service (navigation engine) and display results. We’ve built a servlet-based Java web application, but Endeca supports others like .NET