Virtual Research and Innovation Broker for Europe

The objective is to design and create a system with advanced functionalities for searching and exploiting the information available in the various Eureka data sources. CNR has realized the entire system, hardware and software, and manages hosting and maintenance services on its own site. The platform is based on four main elements. Information Sources that contain information about the partners' projects, companies and their expertise. Standard Common Information (SCI) that defines the set of information to be indexed. Search Engine that is the result of the interaction of three different modules: Communication Tool for taking information from different sources, Indexer for realizing an advanced full-text indexer and Searcher for creating complex queries and for giving the user support instruments. Search interface, an advanced web-based interface based on the existing developments of CNR. In summary, the system which CNR makes available to Eureka is capable of providing the following functionalities: brokering from different sources; automatic indexing of data sources, websites, documents, repositories, databases and other types of content, including those generated dynamically; web interface accessible from any browser; searching with boolean operators and exact phrases with exclusion of terms in the language which may generate noise; highlighting and ordering of results; context of each result; morphological variants; substitution of characters; special characters for advanced functionalities (substitution, phonic searching, morphological variants, interval); distance between words; importance/weight of words; synonyms and related terms; page layout of results; indexing of metadata; searching in structured documents; search fields in unstructured documents; simultaneous use of multiple indexes; automatic search suggestions and translations into other languages.