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1.3 Overview

A content indexing service  helps efficiently organize the extracted features of a collection of documents. The Content Indexing Services Protocol allows a client to communicate with a server hosting an indexing service to issue queries and to allow an administrator to manage the indexing server.

When processing files, an indexing service analyzes a set of documents, extracts useful information, and then organizes the extracted information in such a way that properties of those documents can be efficiently returned in response to queries. A collection of documents that can be queried constitutes a catalog . A catalog might contain an inverted index (for quick word matching) and a property cache (for quick retrieval of property values).

Conceptually, a catalog consists of a logical table of properties with the text or value and corresponding locale stored in columns of the table. Each row of the table corresponds to a separate document in the scope of the catalog, and each column of the table corresponds to a property.

The specific tasks performed by the Content Indexing Services Protocol are grouped into two functional areas:

  • Remote administration of indexing service catalogs

  • Remote querying of indexing service catalogs