opensearch

Recently Scott Sheppard from Autodesk blogged about Docupoint Discovery, an intranet/Internet search engine for AutoCAD files. It works by parsing binary AutoCAD files and indexing their textual and numerical content. Whilst it is not super intelligent (i.e. it doesn't make spacial assumptions based on the actual models submitted) it does help Autodesk workgroup users find information faster. The upshot of the Docupoint Discovery system is that you don't actually need a copy of AutoCAD, it reads the binary files into the index and if you need a quick preview it uses Autodesk's own DWF viewer technology to show it to you (now that is really helpful).

A similar set of functionality can be provided if you are an ArchiCAD Mac user by harnessing OSX's Spotlight functionality and the freely available ArchiCAD Spotlight plug-in. With this plug-in installed OSX can index all your ArchiCAD files (alongside all the other relevant project data like PDF files). Then with the next version of OSX (Leopard) or the open-source Weblight server you can search your Spotlight index on the intranet/Internet via a web browser. It does not offer the DWF-based preview option of Docupoint Discovery but for a zero-cost, minimum configuration solution it is not too shabby.

Providing search services that span a number of disparate websites is a challenging problem that in the past has been left to the big-boys such as Google. However Amazon's OpenSearch RSS format is changing this reality and providing a means for effective multiple website search to be deployed at low cost by small development teams.

Background

Most organisations comprise of a number of different interest groups (I like to think of them as factions) and when it comes to external and internal websites it proves far more efficient to let these groups build and maintain their own independent sites rather than combine them under a single unified banner and management structure. The reasons for this are pragmatic rather than technical, in fact from a purely technical perspective it is far easier to concentrate on building a single massive website as this means one architecture, one management group and a homogonised user base.