Research: Demonstrators: TF-CHIC Distributed Search Demo

DESIRE / TF-CHIC Search Demo

• Try the search demo
  (beginning with all search services known to the TERENA server)

This demonstration illustrates several features of the research into distributed search services undertaken by DESIRE. We use the TF-CHIC search tool here as it provides a simple and clean interface to distributed searching whilst at the same time exposing details of the query routing process.

Relationship to DESIRE

The TF-CHIC tool was produced as part of TERENA's CHIC-Pilot activity investigating cooperative, hierarchical indexing and caching. See the CHIC-Pilot pages for more details. The current status of the software is that, now the pilot has been completed, the software is being contributed into the open-source ROADS toolkit. DESIRE is working to 'polish' these tools to aid the transition from research to services. Other DESIRE demonstrators show the distributed search interface provided natively by the ROADS package, and ongoing work within DESIRE to produce useable and intuitive search interfaces.

The CHIC form will send a search request to DESIRE's search client which will in turn consult a registry of search services to find connection details for various searchable databases. For this demo we use a directory of WHOIS++ services maintained at TERENA. We can however start the search using any WHOIS++ server in the mesh.

Note: By its nature, this demo depends upon various networked services beyond our control. If the search facility is unavailable, please try again later.