Hansard
Solution
Back-end
migration with original user interface preserved
The hansard database provides access for parliamentarians and their support staff to Hansard shortly after the day's sitting. The intranet and public internet sites provide advanced text, keyword and date based searching and retrievals.
The IT support team for South Australia's Parliament, the Parliamentary Network Support Group (PSNG) experienced stability and support issues with this system, which was a significant issue given the critical nature of the information and the profile of the users.
Further, a decision to outsource hosting for the public component of the system was unable to be actioned, as the proprietary back-end environment was not provided or supported by hosting companies.
eWord Development took onboard the challenge to engineer a complete replacement system using an environment that could be readily hosted externally, while ensuring the new system's user interface was identical to the previous.
Technology
The web user interface to the solution was created using Active Server
Pages (ASP) hosted within Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0.
The web pages themselves were developed to exactly mirror the user interface
provided by the previous solution.
The search engine employed was Windows 2000 Server’s Indexing Service, indexing predominantly HTML and Microsoft Word document content. Three distinct index catalogs and a multitude of scopes within each catalog were created in order to logically separate content.
The catalog and scope were then queried dynamically through an HTML form submitting to the ASP search engine. Matching documents were returned as a tabular list of results, ordered by relevance.
The content of documents was then able to be viewed through a custom created DLL. This DLL extended the role performed by the standard Microsoft Indexing Service hit-highlighting functionality to provide navigation between hits within the displayed document and also navigation between matching documents, while increasing performance for the display of very large documents.
Advantages
The new system is scalable, more able to customised to suit specific requirements and importantly, much more stable.
With the delivery of the new solution, the public hansard site was successfully migrated to an ISP for external hosting, enabling the PSNG to focus on their core business.