BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

 to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University

Bielefeld University

Bielefeld University is a university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization and teaching than the established universities...

 Library in Bielefeld

Bielefeld

Bielefeld is an independent city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 323,000, it is also the most populous city in the Regierungsbezirk Detmold...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. It is based on search technology provided by Fast Search & Transfer

Fast Search & Transfer

Fast Search & Transfer ASA is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It also has offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. The company was founded...

 (FAST), a Norwegian

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 company.

BASE is a registered service provider for the Open Archives Initiative

Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative is an attempt to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content . It allows people to harvest metadata...

 (OAI), and has contributed to the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research

Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research

The Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research project aims to provide a unified approach to manage the challenging and evolving Digitial Repository landscape by building an online infrastructure for sharing content and functionality.Many valuable online repositories such as...

 (DRIVER) project since June 2006.

OAI metadata are "harvested

Web harvesting

Web harvesting is commonly used to describe Web scraping from a multitude of sites. It also refers to an implementation of a Web crawler that uses human expertise or machine guidance to direct the crawler to URLs which compose a specialized collection or set of knowledge...

" for the BASE project from scientific digital repositories that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

OAI-PMH is a protocol developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It is used to harvest the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives...

 (OAI-PMH), and are indexed

Index (search engine)

Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics, and computer science...

 using FAST's software.

In addition to OAI metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

BASE is distinguished from commercial search engines by the following features:

• Resources are academically selected
• Document server
  Document server
  A document server is a repository for articles.e.g. Based on the Open Archives Initiative standard, academic institutions store articles of their researchers on a document server, where they are freely accessible for anyone....
  
  s must comply with specific requirements of scientific quality and relevance
• Searches are provided with transparency by a data resources inventory
• Full text search
  Full text search
  In text retrieval, full text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full text database...
  
  es plus metadata are available (where available)
• BASE discloses resources of the deep Web
  Deep web
  The Deep Web refers to World Wide Web content that is not part of the Surface Web, which is indexed by standard search engines....
  
  , which are often ignored by commercial search engines or get lost in vast quantities of hits
• Search results are displayed with precise bibliographic data
  Bibliographic database
  A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc...
  
  (where available)
• There are several options for sorting the result list, and search results can be refined by author, resource, document type, language, etc.)