>The developer of KinoSearch and the
>developer of Ferret (the Lucene port for Ruby) are teaming with one of
>the developers of Lucene to make Lucy (which is a 'shared core' for
>Lucene) which would then make it easier to write interoperable code
>between these languages (at least, I presume that's the goal).
>

Lucene seems to be emerging as a common index format for many languages,
platforms, and projects. The availability of a common index format would
have some really nifty possibilities for libraries. For example, if there
were a lucene index for a citation database and the library's holdings
were also indexed by lucene, it might be possible to leverage the same
format to limit searches to materials that are immediately available,
rather than the "click and hope" model offered by resolvers now. Or even
arbitrary mixing and matching of databases at the index level without
having to replicate the content locally. My only quibble with lucene is
indexing throughput for very large databases but I am told it can
accommodate massive parallelization, in which case there might be a new
purpose for all of those library workstations that sit empty in the wee
hours...

art