About CIDA
The objective of the CIDA program is to facilitate the efforts of the people of developing countries to achieve self-sustainable economic and social development in accordance with their needs and environment, by cooperating with them in developing activities; and to provide humanitarian assistance, thereby contributing to Canada's political and economic interests abroad in promoting social justice, international stability and long-term relationships for the benefit of the global community.
Project Description
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was looking for assistance in the preparation of a Business Case that would present the benefits of a project to integrate the Faceted Search Services from the Government of Canada (GoC) CMS solution with CIDA’s RDIMS implementation.
RDIMS is an example of an information management system that supports information retrieval for structured data. These systems rely upon traditional field-based queries, and allow fast and accurate retrievals for highly trained users and medium-sized information stores. However these solutions are unable to scale without encountering significant usability issues inherent in the field-based approach.
In comparison, information retrieval solutions for unstructured data are concerned primarily with text-based searches, provide advanced linguistic tools, and allow users to refine searches in a highly flexible manner. The most significant problem with these solutions is their inability to organize information in a meaningful manner, which can leave the user “lost in information space”.
Combining the strengths of these two approaches, but without their limitations, a Faceted Search Solution integrates dynamic field-based and text-based searches, to locate and organize structured, semi-structured and unstructured information. Metadata is organized along independent dimensions (hierarchical taxonomies, or “facets” of the information space) to facilitate browsing by category in combination with keyword searches. The GoC CMS Solution includes a faceted search implementation that is available for re-use by GoC CMS participants.
Project Outcomes
CIDA has successfully met its project objectives to obtain the business benefits, costs, risks and available options for implementing the RDIMS – GOC CMS integrated faceted search solution. The CIDA project sponsors now have a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both the RDIMS search and the GOC CMS search. The Business Case also identified the high-level gaps and overlaps in functionality between both search solutions. Using the information presented in the Business Case, the project sponsors will be presenting its findings to the senior level management in order to proceed with a more detailed design phase to create an integrated faceted search architecture. That proposal will also include detailed planning and costing stages for the development and implementation of the solution. |