Ockham Alerting Service

Introduction

This is a simple current awareness service based on the content found at the Internet Archive. 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 implementation is updated on a daily basis and only contains content from the Archive from the past few weeks. (Otherwise, the system wouldn't be a "current" awareness service). Sample searches include:

• trees
• art and science
• rum and hand
• title=literature
• creator=Waller