Zebra - User’s Guide and Reference Sebastian Hammer Adam Dickmeiss Heikki Levanto Mike Taylor Zebra - User’s Guide and Reference by Sebastian Hammer by Adam Dickmeiss by Heikki Levanto by Mike Taylor Copyright © 1995-2005 Index Data Zebra is a free, fast, friendly information management system. It can index records in XML/SGML, MARC, e-mail archives and many other formats, and quickly find them using a combination of boolean searching and relevance ranking. Search-and-retrieve applications can be written using APIs in a wide variety of languages, communicating with the Zebra server using industry-standard information-retrieval protocols. This manual explains how to build and install Zebra, configure it appropriately for your application, add data and set up a running information service. It describes version 1.3.28 of Zebra. Table of Contents 1. Introduction............................................................................................................................................1 Overview ............................................................................................................................................1 Features ..............................................................................................................................................1 Applications .......................................................................................................................................2 DADS - the DTV Article Database Service .............................................................................2 NLI-Z39.50 - a Natural Language Interface for Libraries........................................................2 ULS (Union List of Serials) .....................................................................................................3 Various web indexes .................................................................................................................3 Support ...............................................................................................................................................4 Future Directions................................................................................................................................4 2. Installation..............................................................................................................................................6 UNIX..................................................................................................................................................6 WIN32................................................................................................................................................8 3. Quick Start ...........................................................................................................................................10 4. Example Configurations......................................................................................................................12 Overview ..........................................................................................................................................12 Example 1: XML Indexing And Searching .....................................................................................12 Example 2: Supporting Interoperable Searches ...............................................................................13 5. Administrating Zebra..........................................................................................................................16 Record Types....................................................................................................................................16 The Zebra Configuration File...........................................................................................................16 Locating Records .............................................................................................................................19 Indexing with no Record IDs (Simple Indexing).............................................................................19 Indexing with File Record IDs.........................................................................................................20 Indexing with General Record IDs ..................................................................................................21 Register Location .............................................................................................................................22 Safe Updating - Using Shadow Registers ........................................................................................23 Description .............................................................................................................................23 How to Use Shadow Register Files ........................................................................................23 6. Running the Maintenance Interface (zebraidx)................................................................................25 7. The Z39.50 Server................................................................................................................................27 Running the Z39.50 Server (zebrasrv).............................................................................................27 Z39.50 Protocol Support and Behavior............................................................................................28 Initialization............................................................................................................................29 Search .....................................................................................................................................29 Regular expressions ......................................................................................................29 Query examples ............................................................................................................30 Present ....................................................................................................................................31 Scan ........................................................................................................................................31 Sort .........................................................................................................................................31 Close.......................................................................................................................................32 iii 8. The Record Model ...............................................................................................................................33 Local Representation........................................................................................................................33 Canonical Input Format..........................................................................................................34 Record Root ..................................................................................................................35 Variants .........................................................................................................................35 Input Filters ............................................................................................................................36 Internal Representation ....................................................................................................................38 Tagged Elements.....................................................................................................................39 Variants...................................................................................................................................39 Data Elements.........................................................................................................................39 Configuring Your Data Model..........................................................................................................40 The Abstract Syntax ...............................................................................................................40 The Configuration Files..........................................................................................................40 The Abstract Syntax (.abs) Files ............................................................................................41 The Attribute Set (.att) Files...................................................................................................44 The Tag Set (.tag) Files...........................................................................................................45 The Variant Set (.var) Files.....................................................................................................46 The Element Set (.est) Files....................................................................................................47 The Schema Mapping (.map) Files ........................................................................................48 The MARC (ISO2709) Representation (.mar) Files ..............................................................49 Field Structure and Character Sets .........................................................................................49 The default.idx file........................................................................................................49 The character map file format.......................................................................................50