Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In our pilot project we need to include some city districts and departments in our
enterprise search system. Each city district is treated as a single exclusive department
network that is administered by their internal system administrators. The adminis-
trators are responsible for their own data management and manage their own subdo-
mains within the main domain of the city of Berlin. They also maintain the employed
users' credential and access rights. One of the unique aspects in our use case is that
when an employee is in a department network, they can access the main enterprise
network but not the opposite. Another additional requirement is that a user must first
be logged in with a department account. After successful login a user is verified as
an authorized user and is able to access files on the file servers. We deploy a broker
agent for each district or department participating in the pilot project. These broker
agents are required to verify users' credentials using the respective department's
LDAP server information.
Similar to the crawling processes in the main enterprise network (Sect.
4.5.1
), we
deploy agent ensembles, consisting of crawler agents and search agents, to create
multiple indices from files and data saved in the department network. In this case,
the crawler agent reads and indexes these data including their access list information.
This access list will be used during the processing of search queries. The broker agent
first checks the user's reading rights and groups that they belong to and forwards this
information to the search agents. The search agents use this authentication to filter
out the relevant documents. Finally, the broker agent of the department network is
responsible for merging the results coming from the individual search agents to a
single search result list.
4.5.3 Local Desktop Search
The third important repository that employees access on a daily basis is their own
personal desktop. The desktop computer is the main place where an employee creates
their files, reads their emails, and saves exchanged data fromother employees. During
the completion of their daily tasks, an employee may need to retrieve these data.
In order to incorporate this repository, we implemented a specialized broker agent
that runs as low-priority background process on the employee's desktop computer. To
maintain data security, the local broker agent only processes search requests coming
from the desktop computer itself. Moreover, we provide a desktop agent and mail
agent that index local files and local mail archives. These three agents are packed
as a single local service package that should be installed on a single user computer.
Upon receiving search requests the local broker agent forwards the queries to the
desktop and mail agents and the search results coming from these agents are then
re-ranked and merged to a single result list by the local broker agent.
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