Spring 2006 DLF Forum: Melvyl Recommender Project, 5
3 April, 2006
Text-Based Discovery
●eXtensible TextFramework (XTF):  built on Lucene, Saxon
●Open source, standards-based (XML, XSLT, Java servlets)
●Very different from relational approach
●Built-in ranking capability
The first area of exploration was using a text-based indexing and query system, rather than the standard relational database approach.  We chose to use a system based on Lucene, which is an open-source text search engine.  Essentially, each bibliographic records is treated as a very small document, rather than a collection of fields in a database.  One very significant advantage is that this allowed us to apply ranking methods that are typically used in text retrieval systems.  This capability is built into Lucene.