PRIDE Requirements and Success Factors Work Package 2 of Telematics for Libraries project PRIDE (LB 5624)

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2. State of the Art

2.1 Introduction

This section presents a survey of technologies potentially relevant to PRIDE. Two basic goals are pursued:

• Giving an overall view of the services, protocols, and techniques used nowadays in the information society for their possible support and utilisation in PRIDE
• Avoiding duplicate effort by means of re-using available technologies wherever possible

Many of the descriptions below are kept rather brief in order to make the reader aware of the technologies and their advantages and disadvantages without overburdening him/her with superfluous details. To obtain more detailed information, references are provided.

This survey is organised as follows. In the 'User Interfaces' section various search systems are presented in terms of their front-ends, and the relations between interfaces and architectures of search systems are described. The next section 'Directory Services' describes the core technology behind PRIDE. This is followed by the 'Search and Retrieve' section, which gives an in-depth view on information retrieval protocols and methods. The 'Harvesting' section explains how distributed bits of information can be gathered and indexed for use in search systems. The 'Meta Information' section surveys various data representation formats able to keep meta-information in forms of tags, mark-up etc. Finally, a number of cryptographic techniques are presented in the 'Security and Payments' section.