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HotMeta
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HotMeta is a suite of components for building
web-based metadata portals for online and offline information
holdings. It consists of:
- the Broker: a web-enabled OAI-PMH 2.0
compliant metadata repository and query engine,
- the Gatherer: a web crawler / document
indexer for extracting metadata from HTML documents,
- the OAI Harvester: client software for
harvesting metadata from OAI-PMH 2.0 repositories, and
- utilities for database, metadata record
and user account management, statistical reporting and metadata
record validation.
Key features of the Broker include:
- a tailorable web-based end-user interface for metadata querying
and browsing,
- simple and complex metadata query support with phrases, term
exclusion, word stemming, stop words and one or two levels of
AND/OR/NOT operators,
- highly tailorable result-set and metadata record formatting,
including multiple formats and record ranking schemes,
- support for tailoring and/or internationalization of end-user
error messages,
- support for the MetaCart "shopping trolley", printing
and cut-and-paste friendly display modes,
- query refinement using an add-in GuideBeam hyper-indexer,
- user session management with rights-based access control and
record audit trails,
- can be configured to use of SSL and/or an external LDAP directory
service,
- can be configured to run as an OAI-PMH 2.0 compliant OAI Repository,
- support for Dublin Core, AGLS (AS5044) and ANZLIC metadata schemas,
or site specific metadata schemas,
- support for self-hosted "static" web pages, or use
of an external web server,
- support for metadata quality control using access control aware
workflows and metadata validation,
- support for custom metadata workflows and custom access control
schemes via Java plugins, and
- support for hot-linking to MetaEdit for metadata input, editing
and vetting.
Key features of the Gatherer include:
- web crawling, directed web harvesting and local file harvesting,
- compliance with robot exlusion conventions using "Robots.txt"
files and HTML tags,
- extensive control and tuning parameters for web crawling,
- permissive parsing of HTML documents,
- tailorable raw metadata filtering and validation of gathered
records,
- use with MetaEdit for vetting and editing of gathered records
before publishing, and
- special handling of gathered records in the Broker for efficient
vetting of re-gathered records.
Key features of the OAI Harvester include:
- works with any compliant OAI 2.0 repository,
- a GUI-based tool for managing the harvest schedule,
- support for periodic and once-off harvesting,
- support for incremental harvesting and deletes,
- can save harvested records to files, or upload them directly
to the Broker,
- can perform non-lossy harvesting from other HotMeta Brokers
using the "dstc-reg" format, and
- integrates with HotMeta's quality and access control mechanisms.
The HotMeta utilities include the following:
- utilities for starting and stopping the Broker, and checking
that it is responding to requests,
- utilities for import and export of records from the Broker in
a variety of formats,
- utilities for managing the Broker's database tables, including
'dump' and 'restore' functions for backup and metadata migration,
- utilities for managing HotMeta user accounts and related security
tables,
- migration utilities for regenerating files (e.g. web pages)
from templates,
- a utility for generating statistics on metadata record accessions,
- a PERL utility for generating statistics on Broker usage, including
- most active clients and most popular queries, and
- a utility for validating records in the repository and/or checking
that URL-valued elements (i.e. links) can be resolved.
The HotMeta Broker, Gatherer, Harvester and utilities are implemented
in Java™ for portability.
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