Re: Initial description of Pluggable Content Indexing Service proposalsub-proprosal

[Matthew Mackenzie <matt@xmlglobal.com>]

Farrukh,

This is a great outline, thanks for spending the time on this.  The 
only issue that this brings up, or rather reminds us of, is that of 
where the indexes are stored.  I brought up an issue during the last 
telecon (not the one on Friday that was only attended by Len ;-) ) 
about the indexes being stored as Classification Nodes.  It seemed to 
me that the goal in prescribing this was to find a nook to place these 
things in without modifying the RIM.  This looks a bit like a hack to 
me, something which was meant to be addressed later.

I would like to start a new action item for v3: new structure(s) for 
content indexes.  It could be as simple as having a ContentIndex object 
which holds IndexNode objects.  Underlying implementations could keep 
the indexes in the same physical structures as they do currently (IF 
Appendix D of RS was implemented), just the access methods would need 
to be updated.

Cheers,
Matt

> This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
> 
> 
> 
> In our last meeting I had an AI to write up the idea we discussed for 
a
> pluggable architecture for
> a Content Indexing Service for the content based query proposal. So 
here
> it is:
> 
> The Content Indexing Service
> ------------------------------
> We propose an abstract web service interface in WSDL for an Content
> Indexing Service.
> The interface exposes a method called indexContent that allows an
> arbitrary repository item to be provided to the
> service for indexing.
> 
> The indexContent method returns an XML document conforming to the
> existing ebXML
> Registry 1.0 specifications that includes indexes in form of
> Classification instances that index or
> categorize the repository item.
> 
> Implementation of Content Indexing Service
> ---------------------------------------------
> Any organization may implement one or more Content Indexing Services
> where each is specialized to index a specific type of repository item.
> Each
> implementation of Content Indexing Service is custom tailored for a
> specific repository item type. For example Encoda Systems may 
implement
> a Content Indexing Service for indexing videos.
> 
> Registration of Content Indexing Service
> ------------------------------------------
> The solution does not define how an organization that creates a 
Content
> Indexing
> Service can publish or register the WSDL for that service within the
> registry
> and bind it to a specific type of content. Instead the solution 
assumes
> that the content indexing service is submitted using
> the "Registration of Web Services (ROWS)" proposal as being defined
> within the RAWS sub-team. The
> ROWS proposal provides first class support for web service 
registration
> by defining
> new info model classes called Service, ServiceBinding and
> SpecificationLink
> for registration of any web service in a standard way.
> 
> Details may be found at:
> 
>  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/regrep-raws/200109/msg00000.html
> 
> 
> Dynamic Content Indexing
> ------------------------
> Whenever, a publisher submits a certain type of repository item, the
> registry checks to see if there is a Content Indexing Service 
registered
> for that
> type of repository item. If such a Content Indexing Service is
> registered,
> then the registry invokes the service using the registered WSDL
> description  for
> the Content Indexing Service. In the invocation, it passes the
> repository
> item to the Content Indexing Service and gets back an XML document 
that
> defines
> classifications on the repository item.
> 
> The registry stores the repository item along with the classification
> information that was dynamically generated using the Content Indexing
> Web Service.
> 
> Discovery of Repository Item Based on Dynamic Indexing
> ------------------------------------------------------
> The result of the proposed solution is that a registry client can now
> easily
> discover the repository items of interest based on dynamically 
generated
> 
> classification indexes.
> 
> An interesting aspect of this approach is that we use pluggable web
> service registration into a registry to index arbitrary content about
> which the registry has no apriori knowledge.
> 
> I look forward to your thoughts and suggestions. Matt I will be gald 
to
> work with you in background to provide more specifics and details to
> help fit this sub-proposal to the content based query proposal that 
the
> team is developing for V3. At minimum I expect we will need to spec a
> WSDL description with a SOAP/HTTP binding. More later.
> 
> --
> Regards,
> Farrukh
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Matthew MacKenzie
Xml Global
http://www.xmlglobal.com