Metaserver

A MetaServer is considered a central broker providing a collated view (similar to a database view) for dispersed web resources. It is used to collect data from various web services, web pages, databases, or other online resources/repositories and then present the combined results to the client using a standard web protocol (e.g. HTTP with HTML, REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, etc.).

Styles of use

The purpose of such a system is to provide one or several of the following:

  • a unified view on multiple resources
  • easy comparison of the data
  • standardized access to different repositories
  • calibration of the data
  • determining the data consensus

Example MetaServer projects

Typical, widespread implementations of MetaServers are:

  • Meta-Search-Engines
  • DNS MetaServers
  • Protein Structure and Function Prediction Gateways
  • Computer Game MetaServers
  • Text Mining MetaServers (e.g. BioCreative Metaserver - BCMS)
gollark: Also, I don't really know how to translate that out of relational databases.
gollark: But that would require periodic index updates.
gollark: You could do search a LOT faster by building an inverted index.
gollark: )
gollark: (there's also not a themes system, though I think I could implement a very basic one without horrible problems.
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