Emerge Architecture

Emerge's component architecture is a model of the kind of infrastructure needed to do large-scale distributed search. In it, standard access to legacy databases is enabled with the Gazelle Z39.50 server toolkit. The Gazebo search gateway allows minor syntatic and semantic differences between query formats, metadata schemas and result formats to be masked with an abstract schema suited for a particular search application, and the user or application requiring search capability performs its abstract searches asynchronously using the Gazebo Client Toolkit or XML interface to Gazebo.

Here's a diagram of the Emerge architecture:

The diagram shows that Gazebo can communicate directly with SQL databases. However, we recommend using Gazelle as the interface between SQL databases and Gazebo. Nonetheless, Gazebo provides an plug-in architecture for adding support for a variety of network search protocols on the back end.

Note: Gazelle, formerly known as Pizzazzd, is currently under development.