Future directions

This is a page of notes on possible future directions for MKSearch. There are no plans to implement these features in the immediate future.

Open Office document indexing

The Open Office document format has metadata that would be suitable for indexing:

1. It's all in XML
2. It's stored as a Java archive
3. It contains Dublin Core metadata

See chapter 2 of OpenOffice.org XML Essentials.

PDF indexing

PDFBox is a free Java library that provides access to embedded XMP metadata, which is serialized RDF.

File system indexing

It should be reasonably easy to walk a filesystem directory structure, find and index supported document types using MKSearch. This could make document metadata available on an intranet, so people know who to ask for copy or could get it directly.

JSpider features

Alternative configuration schemes

JSpider currently uses static factory-based configuration loaders with Java property files, which work fine, but cause some difficulties in unit testing. This is not a critical issue, but an alternative form of configuration may be devised.

RDF features

More complex query construction

The current query builder only constructs queries that join a series of RDF triples, not extended queries that specify the RDF type of the object. Such an extension will require changes to the structure of the query and store management classes, possibly a set of supporting query construct classes.