Towards a search driven system architecture for environmental information portals

Abstract

In order to merge data from different information systems in web portals, querying of this data has to be simple and with good performance. If no direct, high-performance query services are available, data access can be provided (and often accelerated) using external search indexes, which is well-proven for unstructured data by means of classical full text search engines. This article describes how structured data can be provided through search engines, too, and how this data then can be re-used by other applications, e.g., mobile apps or business applications, incidentally reducing their complexity and the number of required interfaces. Users of environmental portals and applications can benefit from an integrated view on unstructured as well as on structured data.