[Web4lib] three services from the Ockham Network

[Eric Lease Morgan]

I would like to bring to your attention three services from the  
Ockham Network.


Ockham Alert

This is a sort of current awareness service. On a daily basis it  
harvests "new" OAI content from the primary National Science  
Foundation data repository, and everyday it deletes "old" content. An  
SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) interface is then put on top of the  
underlying content allowing you to get output as HTML pages, RSS  
feeds, and/or email messages. The software and techniques in Ockham  
Alert could be applied to other OAI repositories or sets of "new"  
MARC records. Try:

   http://alert.ockkham.org/


MyLibrary at Ockham

This is an index of more than 430,000 harvested OAI records from many  
OAI repositories. These records are cached in a MyLibrary database,  
indexed with Plucene, used to create subject-specific indexes  
supporting alternative spellings to queries, suggests alternative  
queries through the use of a thesaurus, creates lists of  
statistically significant keywords supporting a Find More Like This  
One feature, and has an SRU interface. Whew! Try:

   http://mylibrary.ockham.org/


Ockham Spell Web Service

Given a word and an optional dictionary, this REST-like Web Service  
will return alternative spellings of the word in an XML stream. This  
XML stream is intended to be incorporated into search engines to  
suggest alternative queries a la Google's Did You Mean? service.  
Three really simple clients have been created against the Service,  
one of them interfaces with the British Library catalogue. Read:

   http://spell.ockham.org/about/


Other Ockham services are in the pipeline including: 1) a human- as  
well as computer-readable registry of digital library services,  
collections, and agents enabling people to discover these resources  
and computer programs to automatically incorporate them into their  
interfaces, and 2) a Live CD demonstrating how libraries can  
implement digital library services and collections using "light- 
weight" protocols and open source software.

For more information about Ockham, see:

   http://ockham.org/


-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University Libraries of Notre Dame

(574) 631-8604