Beagle Extension for Distributed Desktop Search

["Gideon Zenz" <gideon zenz org>]

BeagleDDS is an extension to the Beagle desktop search utility for
information sharing and distributed searching. This developement was
performed by Gideon Zenz and Sebastian Schildt as a student project at the
L3S Research center and Leibniz Universität Hannover.

BeagleDDS addresses the major challenge in today's working environment:
Finding important information on demand. Every project comes with and
generates a lot of relevant information. Every team member creates her own
documents. Using desktop search utilities like Beagle, one is able to
efficiently search within an own document collection. The challenge here is
that often several group members need to obtain same information but
everyone searches for it on her own. Moreover, group members decide to share
information with the rest of the team only if it seems to be relevant
enough.

Obviously, this approach is not very efficient, especially because everyone
has to decide whether or not a local document is relevant for the others. As
a result a user might decide not to share relevant information, or simply
forget to share it with the group members needing it. BeagleDDS extends the
desktop search utility Beagle to allow for information sharing and
distributed search. Moreover it enables teams to form working groups where
they can share documents related to a project with their colleagues.

Using extended Beagle's search facility combined with a distributed ranking
algorithm, every team member will be enabled to quickly identify relevant
documents in an easy manner. In order to protect valuable information and
maintain privacy our solution features group access control and encryption
of search queries and transfers.

The package can be found at http://www.l3s.de/~zenz/BeagleDDS/

Regards,

Gideon Zenz