Features

Muse Applications

A Muse Knowledge Application is an individual instance that runs inside Muse at a customer site or at a group of sites to provide searching or harvesting of resources. It groups a set of modules depending on customer’s desired functionality like:

  • Works in scheduled, automated mode e.g. Harvest. Works in on-demand mode e.g. Federated Search;
  • Real-time search of disparate multiple Data Sources at once;
  • Content returned normalized in format and structure to a single data model;
  • Source specific authentication, searching, extraction;
  • Results Processing, De-Dupe, Cluster, Enrichment, Ranking, etc.;
  • On-the-fly Semantic Analysis;
  • Output formatting for users, client systems;
  • Free access, registered access, subscription access, membership access, employee access;
  • Single sign-on.

API Ready, Bridges, Back-End Server

Software can interact with Muse components by using various APIs. Federated Search Engines, Discovery services, Crawling, Harvest or ETL processes are usual examples of how our partners are using Muse.

Depending on the desired software integration, Muse Bridges implement the API over various protocols: Muse Web Bridge, Muse Z39.50 Bridge, Muse SOAP Bridge or other enterprise software specific implementations.

Muse can be transparently used as a back-end server for any portal or enterprise software to extend its searching or discovery capabilities.

Administration, Multiple Administrators

The easy management via browser based console and their easy usage via enterprise applications give the users and administrators a pleasant experience. By means of administrator consoles there is access to any settings of the system. Each administrator can have access to its own set of administering rights, which can vary from creating administrator accounts to only checking if a source is working.

The granularity of the administering rights allow an extended set of actions as filtering which applications to administer, which sources, which groups of sources, if another administrator users or applications can be created and so on.

Administration consoles are fully integrated with Muse Source Factory such that the evolution of source can be seen in any moment. An administrator can decide based on these information if to update or replace a source. There also are tools to completely configure any source or even to report that a source or a group or sources are not working anymore.

Pre-built Data Source Packages

The Muse Source Factory keeps the details, stores, manages, and distributes the thousands of Muse Smart Connectors to Muse installations worldwide. More than 6,500 different Data Sources are accessed by clients based on their own credentials and rights, using our Muse Smart Connectors. This collection is continuously updated and maintained to keep up with the latest native changes.

Multiple Sources, Various Protocols

The big number of connectors used for a large variety content and source types, make The MuseKnowledge™ Platform a leader in the branch. It connects via tens of protocols (Atom, HTTP/HTML, HTTP/XML, JSON, NCIP, OAI-PMH, RSS1.0, RSS2.0, SIP2, SQL, SRU, SRW, Telnet, Z39.50) to thousands of Data Sources providing either free or premium content, no matter their record formats (XML, MARC, HTML, ISO2709, Fixed position, Fixed length, Lotus Notes, CSV, Office Docs).

Task Scheduler for Maintenance And User Tasks

Muse Control Center can be used to execute tasks at any given moment. The tasks lists, either default or custom, can be used for various purposes, starting from regularly updating the connectors to sending emails to users or even generate usage statistics of the system they run on.

Muse Control Center helps users run saved queries on various sources at any moment, without their intervention. The records extracted can be either sent by email or stored on disk and provided at a later time on demand.

Administration tasks can be also managed from Muse Control Center by specialized tasks. Such tasks do jobs, as checking the installed sources, get the latest versions from Muse Source Factory, check for new versions, making backups after updates also.

Tasks can be set to run periodically and send new results to user's inbox. Thus, any new result that appeared in one or many sources will be instantly spot.

End User Authentication

End user authentication is handled by single sign-on techniques. Muse controls end users’ access to resources using either User/Password files, client IP addresses, standard or custom authentication methods (LDAP, IMAP, SQL, SAML, LTI, HMAC, Referer URL). Users are thus granted access to the application area containing the authorized resources with just a single point of access.

Extended Logging Capabilities

Each Muse Product generates log files which are kept in special designated places. Sizing of logs dimension and rotation rules are very flexible, matching any usage of the servers. There are also available many logging levels.

The generated logs are of various types, either in well-know formats or proprietary. The proprietary ones are used to keep statistical information or debug, functional information and are analyzed by proprietary tools. The other logs, in the standard formats, can be also analyzed by our tools or others, like AWStats.

Sessions, Searches, Users Monitoring and Statistics

Muse offers high level real time monitoring and logging. Muse reports various types of statistical information through JMX and log files. The logged data can be used to obtain any kind of information, from the standard access logs as for any web server, to statistic logs which keep detailed data for all the Muse activity.

There are reports, either in graphical representation or tabular for most activities: successful logins, successful queries, unsupported queries, session life time, number of searches, number of sessions per period of time and so on.

The statistics exported through JMX can be read periodically using a JMX client program and they can be used for creating sheets or graphics of the Muse run-time activity.

Multi-Platform

Being implemented in Java, Muse can virtually run on any platform the Oracle Java Virtual Machine can. The Muse Setup is also multi-platform, providing both, OS dependent and independent installation packages.

Load Balancer Ready

Muse is load balancer ready. Using complex strategies, it can be places behind a software or hardware balancer to cover high traffic and usage requirements. There are available comprehensive manuals that treat any case of balancing, starting with scenarios where balancing should be applied and ending with very detailed settings that must be applied to each Muse component.

Partner Source Factory

This product extends the main Muse Source Factory into an architecture which allows local Muse Source Factory (Partner Source Factory) installations at Partners for various reasons, as: sources download into local Muse Installations of the customers, source development at partners’ side. This can be even seen as a distributed architecture.

There are tools that maintain synchronization between Muse Source Factory and Partner Source Factory installations. Also, any client having a Partner Source Factory install can use the specially designed tools to develop and maintain its own source connectors.

Developing Tools

Integrated Development Environment, a suite for building connectors. The suite is completely integrated with Muse Source Factory to allow authorized staff to view development progress. Using the Muse Integrated Development Environment, building connectors becomes a production line activity, and maintenance takes its toll, as there are available syntax mappers, data conversion generators, overnight builds and automated testing. All these are much easier and more efficient, reducing the weeks needed for hand coded connectors to days.