MarkLogic Server can help IT organizations overcome many of their challenges around handling content. It offers high-availability and superior scalability, integrates into your existing IT infrastructure and takes advantage of commodity hardware to keep costs low. And because of its architecture, MarkLogic Server also reduces maintenance costs, freeing up your resources for other tasks.

Designed specifically to handle XML content, MarkLogic Server lets you easily load, query, manipulate and render content to address some of your key content challenges—size, structure and semantics.

Load

MarkLogic Server’s import and conversion services are available interactively and through comprehensive application programming interfaces. Content can be imported either in batch or through an interactive drag and drop interface. Local and network file folders can also be mapped to MarkLogic Server so that when a file is dropped into a network folder it is automatically loaded and processed.

During import, MarkLogic Server automatically converts popular document formats—such as Microsoft Office, PDF and HTML—to XML, and indexes the content for immediate accessibility. Of course, MarkLogic Server can also load XML documents, without requiring adherence to any predefined DTD or XML schema. MarkLogic Server automatically parses the XML to detect document structure (e.g., headings, paragraphs, diagrams, captions) and creates a rich XML index of the content to augment the full-text index that is also created.

MarkLogic Server provides a web services interface as part of its content processing framework, enabling external applications to enrich the content with additional tags, annotations, metadata, and references through processes such as categorization and entity extraction.

Query

MarkLogic Server goes well beyond basic search by providing not only standard full-text search capabilities, but also database-style queries against content. Its full-text search delivers all the standard search capabilities you need for your content applications, such as phrase, Boolean, proximity, wildcard, parametric and range search capabilities. It also supports language processing, such as stemming, thesauri and spell-checking.

Beyond the capabilities of a typical search engine, MarkLogic Server indexes XML elements, their structure, and the text within them. This means that MarkLogic Server can quickly evaluate text queries, structural queries and queries that combine both text and structural constraints (e.g., find diagram captions that mention “engine” in articles which appear in the category of “passenger aircraft” and order the results on aircraft type.)

MarkLogic Server delivers the industry’s most extensive implementation of the W3C-standard XML Query (XQuery) language. By providing a query language, as opposed to a search box and simple API, MarkLogic Server allows you to write much more powerful queries than what's possible with search engines. And you can write those queries in a high-level programming language that does not bind you to a vendor’s proprietary syntax or API.

Manipulate

MarkLogic Server is designed to process and manipulate content. The underlying capabilities include transactional updates, content processing pipelines and flow control, and a powerful XQuery engine for querying and manipulating content. These capabilities mean that:

Content is transformed, reformatted and reorganized, either in place or on the fly. The transformations can be performed at nearly any level of granularity, fostering incremental upgrades of content.

Content is updated transactionally. These updates are at the element level, so the system never updates an entire document just for a small change. However, updates for entire document collections are handled coherently, so there's no concern about partial updates.

Content is assembled from any documents in the contentbase, with formatting and schema issues resolved through on-the-fly transformation. This makes it easy to combine and repurpose content from multiple sources.

Render

Once you've queried your content to find the information you desire and manipulated it through various transformations, the next step is delivering that content to users in the form that they desire. MarkLogic Server's rendering capabilities let you do just that.

MarkLogic Server makes it easy to format content to customize the look and feel for various applications and audiences. Its XQuery engine provides speed and flexibility for the reformatting process, making it easy to dynamically create custom documents from components of existing content.

Using MarkLogic Server, applications deliver content quickly and easily through multiple channels. You can output in XHTML for delivery to web pages, WAP or SMS for delivery to phones, or through XSLFO to PDF for print. You can also syndicate your content using web services, outputting it in RSS format or other proprietary syndication systems. This allows users and organizations to subscribe to your feeds and read your content as it is produced.

Download a trial copy of MarkLogic Server or visit our developer network for more information.