indeksbase

Indeksbase is a proposed open framework for organizing, storing, and exchanging indexing metadata and search indexes across heterogeneous data stores. It aims to provide a common data model and set of APIs to enable interoperability among databases, search engines, and analytics platforms that rely on indexed data.

Core concepts include an index definition, fields, document representations, and ranking signals. The schema is designed to describe what is indexed, how documents are structured, update semantics, and provenance information such as source and timestamp. Index definitions can be versioned and extended via plugins or adapters that map between native data models and the common base.

Architecture and data model: An index is a collection of fields describing attributes of documents. Each document has a unique identifier and a set of field values. Rankings or scores can be expressed as signals associated with documents. Provisions for updates, deletes, and incremental indexing are included, along with audit trails and metadata about data sources.

Operations: The framework defines APIs for creating index definitions, pushing updates, querying across indexes, and retrieving index metadata. Security and access control support authentication, authorization, and encryption for index data in transit and at rest. Interoperability is achieved through adapters that translate between native database or search engine formats and the indeksbase model.

Governance and status: Indeksbase emerged as an open community project in the early 2020s with a public specification and reference implementations. It features a governance model based on open discussions, draft versions, and consensus-based changes. Adoption includes several experimental projects and academic uses; mainstream production use remains limited.

See also: Information retrieval, Database indexing, Full-text search, Lucene, Elasticsearch, Data interoperability.