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Today, March 26th is Document Freedom Day (DFD). The whole computer industry (perhaps except from Microsoft and friends) focus on interoperability and open document formats this day.

This of course links nicely into the debate about whether ISO should adopt Microsoft’s fresh OOXML format which basically is an XML-ification of legacy MS-Office binary document formats, as international standards based on the ECMA draft document, or whether the industry is better suited cooperating on today’s ISO standard for office documents, the Open Document Format (ODF).

The discussion some times looks like a war, and Microsoft has spent a lot of energy (and money, some claim) the last months in persuading the national ISO bodies to vote for their format, so that they can claim to be standards compliant rather than being forced to implement ODF, which MS view as a serious threat to their solid MS-Office monopoly. This has been carefully created over the last decade, locking users into buying and upgrading their MS-Office software to be able to read the latest and greates .doc, .xml and .ppt files being sent from business partners and friends. Being forced to support ODF in MS-Office will mean the beginning of real competition on the Office-suite market since the major barrier for interoperability, the document format, is removed.

To learn more about free document formats and the Document Freedom Day, visit http://www.documentfreedom.org/

In this blog post, Sesam annonces that their middleware architecture, Sesam Search Application Toolkit (SESAT) is released as open source software. This is the piece of software (written in Java) which sits between the portal (such as sesam.no) and the data sources (such as FAST ESP, Yahoo! or a database) and dispatches in parallel a single user query into multiple underlying requests and returns everything according to business rules. This is often referred to as federated search.

Here’s Sesam’s own description of the software:

“SESAT is search middleware and a search portal framework. SESAT enables a single user query to be dispatched to multiple information sources. The result is analysed, weighted and presented to the user according to configurable business rules.”

Congratulations with contributing to Open Source, Sesam! And good luck with creating a community around this important piece of middleware, we’ll see more and more demand for it in the future!

Now, go check it out on http://sesat.no/ if this is something that can be useful to you!

PS: Learn more about other federated search solutions at the federatedsearchblog.com