Alfresco OpenSearch - An Interview with Dave Caruana, Chief Architect, Alfresco
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007In my blog I wrote an article titled “It’s a Consumer-Driven, Distributed, Federated, Heterogeneous World (for Content)” and about the need for OpenSearch. (Scroll down to the bottom of the blog to play the podcast)
In this I highlighted an Accenture study that found:
The web is not one website and corporate content is not one repository - It’s a Distributed Content World
- 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
- 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs
It’s a Federated World. To analyze a competitor you need to search across internal repositories and external repositories. These may be content management systems, blogs, wikis - It’s a Heterogeneous World
- 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
Given this scenario the only option is to use standards to search across these repositories and OpenSearch is the ideal standard being used by companies such as:
- Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Technorati, Creative Commons and many more
In this interview we discuss:
- The need for distributed, federated search
- What is OpenSearch
- Why Alfresco chose to use OpenSearch
- OpenSearch and the Alfresco repository
- OpenSearch and the Alfresco client
- Future plans around OpenSearch
- How to find out more information
Some useful links are:
David Caruana has written an excellent blog on Alfresco OpenSearch.
John Newton has also written an excellent blog on Open Search.
Alfresco 2.0 can be downloaded at
http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/
and read about in the Wiki at
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/OpenSearch
Enjoy listening
ian
