FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Lisa
Schiff
California
Digital Library
University
of California,
Office of the President
415
20th
St.,
4th
Floor
Oakland,
CA 94612
(510) 587-6132
[log in to unmask]
http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/xtf/
California Digital Library
Announces New Release of the eXtensible Text Framework
(XTF)
Oakland, CA, May 12, 2008 - The California Digital
Library (CDL) is pleased to announce a new release of its search and display
technology, the eXtensible
Text Framework (XTF) version 2.1 (http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/xtf/
). XTF is an open source, highly flexible
software application that supports the search, browse and display of
heterogeneous digital content. XTF
offers efficient and practical methods for creating customized end-user
interfaces for distinct digital content collections.
Highlights from
the 2.1 release include:
- Extensive interface improvements, including new search forms,
built-in faceted browsing, and a new look and feel.
- Increased support for document and information exchange formats.
- XHTML and OAI-PMH output
- NLM article format indexing and output
- Microsoft Word indexing
- Streamlined XSLT stylesheets for simpler deployment and adaptation.
- Updated documentation that has been moved to the XTF project
wiki, allowing XTF implementers to share solutions
with entire user community.
- "Freeform" Boolean query language, offered as an experimental
feature.
- Backward compatibility with existing XTF
implementations.
A complete
list of changes is available on the XTF Project page on
SourceForge, where the distribution (including
documentation) can also be downloaded.
Since the first
deployment of XTF in 2005, the development strategy has been to build and
maintain an indexing and display technology that is not only customizable, but
also draws upon tested components already in use by the digital library and
search communities - in particular the Lucene text search engine, Java, XML, and
XSLT. By coordinating these pieces
in a single platform that can be used to create multiple unique applications,
CDL has succeeded in dramatically reducing the investment in infrastructure,
staff training and development for new digital content projects.
XTF offers a
suite of customizable features that support diverse intellectual access to
content. Interfaces can be designed
to support the distinct tools and presentations that are useful and meaningful
to specific audiences. In addition,
XTF offers the following core features:
- Easy to deploy: Drops
directly in to a Java application server such as Tomcat or Resin; has been
tested on Solaris, Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems.
- Easy to configure:
Can create indexes on any XML element or attribute; entire
presentation layer is customizable via XSLT.
- Robust: Optimized to perform well on large
documents (e.g., a single text that exceeds 10MB of encoded text); scales to
perform well on collections of millions of documents; provides full Unicode
support.
- Extensible:
- Works well with a variety of authentication systems (e.g., IP
address lists, LDAP, Shibboleth).
- Provides an interface for external data lookups to support
thesaurus-based term expansion, recommender systems, etc.
- Can power other digital library services (e.g., XTF contains an
OAI-PMH data provider that allows others to harvest metadata, and an SRU
interface that exposes searches to federated search engines).
- Can be deployed as separate, modular
pieces of a third-party system (e.g., the module that displays snippets of
matching text).
- Powerful for the end user:
- Spell checking of queries
- Faceted displays for browsing
- Dynamically updated browse lists
- Session-based bookbags
These
basic features can be tuned and modified.
For instance, the same bookbag feature that allows users to store links
to entire books, can also store links to citable elements of an object, such as
a note or other reference.
A sampling of
XTF-based applications both within and outside of the CDL include:
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