Standards in the CHIC-Pilot Distributed Indexing Architecture

The CHIC-Pilot project is a TERENA coordinated effort investigating the feasibility of setting up a large-scale distributed indexing service for searching Web-based research information. It brings together existing search services throughout Europe, integrating them into a coherent architecture. This paper describes both formal and de-facto standards used for various components in the CHIC-Pilot architecture, that support functionality ranging from a uniform search interface and query routing to robot-based gathering of resource descriptions and the handling of metadata. We also discuss techniques for interfacing components of search services using different standards and protocols to provide a unified service to the user.