Towards next generation CiteSeer: a flexible architecture for digital library deployment

CiteSeer began as the first search engine for scientific literature to incorporate Autonomous Citation Indexing, and has since grown to be a well-used, open archive for computer and information science publications, currently indexing over 730,000 academic documents. However, CiteSeer currently faces significant challenges that must be overcome in order to improve the quality of the service and guarantee that CiteSeer will continue to be a valuable, up-to-date resource well into the foreseeable future. This paper describes a new architectural framework for CiteSeer system deployment, named CiteSeer Plus. The new framework supports distributed indexing and storage for load balancing and fault-tolerance as well as modular service deployment to increase system flexibility and reduce maintenance costs. In order to facilitate novel approaches to information extraction, a blackboard framework is built into the architecture.