Pazpar2 is a high-performance, user interface-independent, data model-independent metasearching middleware webservice featuring merging, relevance ranking, record sorting, and faceted results. It is the engine behind our hosted MasterKey metasearch solution.
In a nutshell, pazpar2 is a web-oriented Z39.50 client. It will search a lot of targets in parallel and provide on-the-fly integration of the results. The interface is entirely webservice-based, and you can use it from any development environment. It has been particularly designed to be a good fit for use in conjunction with Ajax to build dynamic end-user experiences, and this can be combined with server-side logic to support authentication, resource selection, etc. Configuration can be static, using XML configuration files, or fully dynamic, using the webservice API.

It is data model-independent in the sense that incoming records are normalized using XSLT to an internal tagged-field representation, and the software can in turn be configured to use different elements of that format for ranking, merging, sorting, facets, and display.

If you would like installation, configuration and/or customization services, or even a complete, turnkey, customized metaseach solution, please contact us. If you need to access resources that do not directly support Z39.50, we can help with that, too -- we have tools and gateways to cover a very broad range of requirements.