Enabling and Integrating Distributed Web Resources for Efficient and Effective Discovery of Information on the Web

Abstract

National Portal of India [1] integrates information from distributed web resources like websites, portals of different Ministries, Departments, State Governments as well as district administrations. These websites are developed at different points of time, using different standards and technologies. Thus integrating information from the distributed, disparate web resources is a challenging task and also has a reflection on the information discovery by a citizen using a unified interface such as National Portal. The existing text based search engines would also not yield desired results [7].

Couple of approaches was deliberated to address the above challenge and it was concluded that a metadata replication based approach would be most feasible and sustainable. Accordingly solution was designed for replication of metadata from distributed repositories using services oriented architecture. Uniform Metadata specifications were devised based on Dublin core standard [9]. To begin with solution is being implemented among National Portal and 35 State Portals spread across length and breadth of India. Metadata from distributed repositories is replicated to a central repository regardless of the platform and technology used by distributed repositories. Simple Search Interface has also been developed for efficient and effective information discovery by the citizens.