Federator

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What is the Perceptive Enterprise Search Federator?

The Perceptive Enterprise Search federator is a search engine aggregator that enables your user's to perform searches over third-party diverse heterogeneous engines and other sources including document management systems, databases, content repositories and enterprise applications that may exists locally, on the LAN, the WAN or across the Internet.

Perceptive Enterprise Search's federator allows you to leverage you organizations existing search technology to create a seamless search environment. Your users can search will be able to search across all your systems with a single click.

Perceptive Enterprise Search provides connectors to the following sources out-of-the-box:

• Flickr
• Google Drive
• Google News
• ImageNow
• Library of Congress
• Lotus Domino
• Lotus Notes
• OpenSearch
• RSS Feeds
• SharePoint 2007
• SharePoint 2013
• TRIM Context
• Twitter
• Wikipedia

You can provide custom connectors to extended Perceptive Enterprise Search using the connector API.  Connectors can be written in .NET, COM, Java or script (WSH).

How does Perceptive Enterprise Search Federator work?

The Perceptive Enterprise Search Server receives search requests from your users.  When the search contains a federated source, Perceptive Enterprise Search will pass the query to each connector for query translation and to fetch the results.  Once the results have been returned, Perceptive Enterprise Search will present them using the standard results view.

There are many ways you can get your content federated by Perceptive Enterprise Search, these including using RSS aggregation, OpenSearch support or writing a low level connection. Both RSS and OpenSearch allow you to leverage existing infrastructure, minimizing the amount of effort required to federate a foreign system.

RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” is a method that web servers can use to publish feeds of information using an XML standard. Applications know as RSS aggregators or “feed readers” can gain access to this information to show the data. Although may RSS feeds are static, or do not allow queries to passed in, several search engines do support RSS of search results, allow a query to be passed on the URL returning the results as XML.

This can be a convenient method of federating your system with Perceptive Enterprise Search. If your system already supports RSS with the ability to post queries, you can simply add the feed to Perceptive Enterprise Search without the need for coding.

The OpenSearch standard extends RSS by publishing information about how to talk to the server. For example, how to get to subsequent pages of the result list. A server that supports OpenSearch can again be imported directly into Perceptive Enterprise Search with zero coding.

If your system does not support either RSS or OpenSearch, you will need to write a federated connector yourself. The Perceptive Enterprise Search Federator Connector API allows you to create connectors in .NET, script (WSH) or languages that support the creation of COM objects.

Each federated connector serves a dual purpose:

1.       Translate the incoming query into a format that the remote server understands.

2.       Translate the results into a format the Perceptive Enterprise Search understands.