A basic form of meta-information is structure identifying the sections of a document or collection. Looking further into the future, meta-information can also include data such as reviewers' opinions, statistics, comments, ratings, and all sorts of highly specific information about information. . . At the core of this system is a new protocol, the Blocks Protocol. The SpaceServer speaks this protocol to communicate with other SpaceServers and to communicate with two other kinds of software components we have developed, Builders and Mixers.
Mixers are tools that find meta-information from a variety of sources on the Internet.
They use the Blocks protocol to send the data into SpaceServer engines. Our primary design considerations have been speed and global scalability. It includes a full-text search engine and incorporates other data storage systems such as databases and text search engines. Builders use the Blocks protocol to retrieve meta-information from SpaceServer engines and to prepare it for display by a Web browser or other tool you might be using to search, view and analyze information. . . The retrieve operation is able to pull data out using any XML tag or attribute as a search criterion.