Ockham Alerting Service

Introduction

This is (the beginnings of) a current awareness service based on National Science Foundation Digital Library content. It demonstrates a standards-based method for collecting content, providing access to it, and disseminating it on a regular basis in the form of an alerting service. The method includes:

1. identifying OAI repositories with content of interest
2. using OAI to harvest content and store it in a central pile
3. indexing the content of the central pile
4. providing an SRU interface to the index
5. allowing users to save the SRU URL's as "profiles" (RSS feeds)
6. allowing users to have the profiles executed on a regular basis
7. making the results of searches available as HTML, email, RSS, etc.
8. returning to Step #1

Downloads

You can download the source from here (alert.ockham.org/src/ockham-alert.tar.gz) or the mirror at Google Code (code.google.com/p/ockham-alert/).

Example implementation

This (incomplete) implementation contains the content of only thirty OAI repositories, and only a thirty days of content at that -- about 200,000 records. Example searches include:

• trees
• art and science
• cogprints and hand
• art and science not Biblioteke
• title="risk factors"
• creator="university of houston"