A Metadata Search Engine for Digital Language Archives

AbstractIn this article we describe the design and implementation of a full-featured metadata search engine within the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC). Unlike many digital library search engines, this particular implementation has a high degree of affinity with web search engines in terms of reasoning and results display, and presumes no knowledge of the underlying metadata or database structures on behalf of the user. Features of the search engine include a variety of string matching algorithms; a thesaurus of alternate language names; language code searching; keyword-in-context display in search results; search for similarly spelled words; search for similar items; support for standard string search operators and domain-specific inline syntax; and automatically derived search links for other web search engines. A notable contribution of this research is the inclusion in the search engine results of a metadata quality-centric sorting algorithm.