DS420 Group Project

The objective of this project group was to design and develop a metasearch interface--that is, a front-end interface for one or more of the existing search engines on the web. This interface accepts queries from a web user and presents the results of that query as an interactive, virtual world. This world is constructed dynamically while the user navigates through it, and the process of collecting search results is distributed between client and server.

Establish an understanding of the issues surrounding distributed virtual worlds

Create a useful and impressive system on the web

Generally increase awareness about VRML and virtual reality technology

Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)

Java on both client and server (possibly J++ on the server)

Active Server Pages and COM

Additional scripting to glue the pieces together (javascript, VBScript)

Parsing--or otherwise obtaining--search results from the web search engine(s)

Multithreaded queue access: query results are queued and dequeued independently.

Marshalling search results from a Java component on the server to a Java component on the client.

Quality test planning and execution

Aesthetic and behavioral design for the virtual world

Project Proposal
Architecture and Team Roles
Obstacles and Design Changes

Active Server Pages
Generating VRML Using ASPs
VRML and Java

Alta Vista
Meta-Search
Gathering Search Results from Alta Vista
Marshalling Our Search Results

Source Code

Product

Lab Site	DePaul CTI, Distributed Systems Lan Lab This site is active at the time of this publication--Autumn Quarter, 1999. However, we are not aware of any guarantees that it will remain so in subsequent quarters.
Archived Site	This will be active and operational only when this report is located on an ASP-aware server where MetaSearch.dll is registered with RegSvr32.
Simulated Search Results World

Media Credits

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