1.3 Overview

The WSS helps to efficiently organize the extracted features of a collection of documents. The Windows Search Protocol allows a client to communicate with a server hosting a GSS, both to issue queries and to allow an administrator to manage the indexing server.

When processing files, the WSS 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 comprises a catalog. A catalog can 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 Windows Search Protocol are grouped into two functional areas:

• Remote administration of GSS catalogs

• Remote querying of GSS catalogs