Build location-based applications and services

Use MarkLogic Server’s geospatial capability to create new dynamic location-based applications that help busy users on the go get access to the content they need. Location-based services can help organizations create loyal users and generate new revenue streams from content that might otherwise go unused.

Content enrichment

MarkLogic Server enables you to enrich information without reloading your content. You can add tags to content to identify key entities or concepts, improving your users' ability to find the information they want. For example, editors can update documents with annotations and metadata, users can add comments or ratings, and automated tools can identify entities or add location information all without reloading. With MarkLogic Server, you can leverage this meta-information to build new applications or features, without having to convert all of your content to a standard schema.

Faster, more efficient application development

Whether you are looking to build new applications for your organization or embed XML content capabilities into your existing products, MarkLogic Server provides the single infrastructure necessary to build and deploy applications. It includes an XML repository, full-text and XML search capabilities, an XQuery engine, and a web server, giving you everything you need to meet your XML content delivery needs. This means that you can more quickly develop applications, and those applications run more efficiently and effectively because they are on a single platform, saving you time and money.

Ease of content integration

MarkLogic Server supports loading content “as-is”, which means you can avoid making costly, time consuming, and sometimes impossible transformations with your content. Instead, you can easily combine XML content, documents, books, messages, user generated content and more into a single centralized repository. You can also get started more quickly when creating applications, because you don’t need to try to convert your content to its final form before you start experimenting with new applications and new business models.

Increased agility

Add the agility your organization needs to respond to changing demands and market conditions. With MarkLogic Server, you can experiment with your content and rapidly develop and deploy new content applications that solve a wide array of needs. This will help you find new opportunities to exploit your existing content to increase revenue and operational efficiency.

Powerful document re-use

Using modular document capabilities, MarkLogic Server makes it easy to re-use commonly-used content in many documents to avoid re-creating information. For example, a description of a cooling fan may be used in the manual for all parts that use that fan. This is especially useful for documents that need to be translated — when a part changes, you need only re-translate the part that has changed. Additionally, you can better ensure consistency of your content by including a standard product overview in every feature description. Whenever the standard product overview changes, every feature description that includes it is updated.

Update users instantly when relevant content arrives

Forcing users to repeatedly search for content is time consuming and inefficient. Powerful alerting capabilities within MarkLogic Server allow users to set up alerts, which notify them when content that meets their interest is loaded. MarkLogic Server makes it easy to monitor dynamic information streams like RSS and ATOM feeds and look for information. Users can combine key word, geospatial, entity and structure information, resulting in highly targeted and relevant alerts.

Improved re-purposing of your XML content

MarkLogic Server gives you the flexibility to experiment with new business models, create prototypes of applications and repurpose your content for new and possibly unforeseen uses. Make your existing content go further by using it for multiple purposes —print, online delivery, syndication, and more. This agility means that you have the freedom to repackage existing content into new information products that drive new revenue streams and reach new users.

Greater understanding of content / use patterns

Gain a better understanding of your content – and how users are working with it through content analytics. MarkLogic Server lets you understand and find new patterns, relationships and other details within your content. This knowledge of how your content is related and how users interact with it enables you to evolve and refine your products to better meet user needs.

Flexible, dynamic delivery

Dynamically deliver content in any format or to any device, and improve the accessibility of your information. MarkLogic Server allows you to query content, combine it on the fly, and perform any transformations and deliver to the user dynamically. This means you can satisfy a larger set of users by delivering just the content they want in the context they need.

Making content findable

MarkLogic Server enables you to provide users with a rich navigation experience by enabling them to easily browse through their content or refine their search results using facets — based on categories or tags - to find the information they are looking for. This means that your users find what they need faster and are more satisfied with their search experience, increasing repeat visits and re-use.

Simple, cost-effective growth

MarkLogic Server is designed to efficiently scale up and out on today’s commodity hardware. It has an advanced architecture that was designed to scale to internet-size problems while delivering sub-second response times to user queries. This means that as your deployment grows you can support more users and more content with fewer servers, resulting in reduced hardware and maintenance costs. Additionally, data center costs can be lower due to the fact that fewer servers are required to meet your content needs.

Meet a broad range of user needs

Organizations select MarkLogic Server because of the comprehensive set of capabilities available in a single platform for applications. They find that they can replace two or three separate technologies with one platform, reducing development, maintenance and administration costs. By providing the capability for storage, search, alerting, geospatial query, entity enrichment and much more Mark Logic provides the most complete platform for XML applications.

MarkLogic Server differs from traditional technologies such as hybrid-relational databases and enterprise search engines in that it was designed and optimized for handling XML content. This fundamental architectural difference provides you with a sustainable long-term advantage that cannot be achieved with traditional technologies.

In comparison with using hybrid-relational databases and search engines for your application, MarkLogic Server has a number of advantages:

Built for content

MarkLogic Server is designed from the ground up for XML content. This means that it allows you to load content quickly regardless of schema, and still leverage the inherent structure of your information for processing. With the power of XML as its native storage format, MarkLogic Server provides the most flexible search and delivery options available on the market.

Superior scalability

MarkLogic Server is designed to efficiently manage repositories from 10s of gigabytes up to 100s of terabytes of XML content, while providing sub-second response times during the most demanding user loads. Based on a distributed architecture of commodity hardware servers, configurations are easily expanded as needs grow. Performance optimization for content loading and query evaluation lowers hardware costs by requiring fewer servers.

Geospatial

Increasingly, information needs to be delivered within a geospatial context. MarkLogic Server includes geospatial support, which provides fast search, retrieval and analysis of content marked up with geospatial data. By using the integrated full-text search and geospatial query, organizations can create high-performance location-based services, which fully leverage the value of their content, delivering it to users with greater context, based on their physical location.

Large-scale alerting

The more information organizations gather, the harder it is for employees and customers to find what they are looking for. MarkLogic Server includes large-scale alerting (sometimes called triggers or profiles) functionality, which is designed to perform well across two dimensions: large numbers of alerts and extremely large amounts of content. Additionally, alerts can be defined using a wide range of factors including key word, structure, entity, geospatial information — all in any combination, which means users can immediately know about any new relevant information they seek.

Universal indexing

The universal index within MarkLogic Server is automatically populated with both the full-text and XML structure within XML content. This single view of information assets leads to faster configuration, lower maintenance costs and increased agility. Other systems often require three or more indexes to achieve the same functionality, drastically increasing the storage and maintenance requirements.

Instant content availability

Search engines have a built-in lag between when content is available and when it’s indexed (and returned by searches). With MarkLogic Server, as soon as content is added to the contentbase or changed, it is immediately available and returned in all appropriate searches. This means that you do not have to worry about users getting wrong results due to stale content in the index.

Combined XML and text search

MarkLogic Server allows you to write powerful queries that combine XML and text constraints (e.g., find contracts with a “governing law” section and a paragraph in the section containing “California”). The combined search provides for more powerful search capabilities that can be exposed to the users as needed. This unique blend of relevance-based models with database-style functionality provides multiple ways to access your content.

One-step answers

MarkLogic Server provides one-step answers to queries by returning specified content elements directly, instead of links to entire documents. Users no longer need to click through to each link in a list of results individually, repeating the process until they find the answer—improving their satisfaction with your application’s search.

Structure-aware XML search

MarkLogic Server can search XML elements, attributes, values, and combinations, with a full understanding of the hierarchy. This means your search will examine document structure and metadata, as well as words, giving you more flexibility when designing your search strategy. This enables you to build next-generation applications that better leverage your content.

Powerful XQuery implementation

MarkLogic Server provides the industry’s most extensive implementation of the W3C-standard XML Query (XQuery) language and fully supports the XQuery 1.0 recommendation. This means you can write applications in a high-level, declarative language and take advantage of training courses and other open access resources when developing and maintaining your applications, reducing your overall costs.

XML repository with transactional storage

MarkLogic Server can be the system of record for your content, providing you with a single integrated and centralized version of your content, reducing the storage costs that result from duplication of an entire cache as is done with search engines. It implements a transactional system that is designed for consistent information access even when content is actively being updated or modified. Furthermore, transactions are handled in a fully non-blocking manner, ensuring that users will never have to wait for results. This real time view of your information also means that results will always reflect the latest changes.

Comprehensive platform

MarkLogic Server provides the broadest set of functionality on the market for storing, managing and delivering XML based information. From ingest to update, enrichment, transformation and delivery it is specifically architected to handle large amounts of rapidly changing XML. Unlike other systems which “bolt on” multiple products to try to achieve a similar level of capability, each feature is built-in and designed to be used in combination with others. The result is that organizations can imagine and build content applications which leverage their information more fully than ever before resulting in increased revenue and more satisfied users.

MarkLogic Server was architected for XML with the goal of handling extremely large amounts of content and providing exceptionally fast access to that content using XQuery. These architectural principals have resulted in a platform that provides you with a sustainable long-term advantage when dealing with your content. As your content grows, becomes more complex or needs to be delivered in new ways, MarkLogic Server is already in position to help you with those needs, no matter what they are.

The key areas in which MarkLogic Server delivers the functionality you need to develop content applications include:

XML content store

MarkLogic Server stores and processes content as XML. This means that, unlike search engines, Mark Logic can serve as the system of record for your content by providing persistent storage of content. It also means that content processing is performed in an extremely efficient manner, providing significant performance advantages over technologies that must convert to some other representation before processing.

Entity enrichment

MarkLogic Server includes built-in entity enrichment capabilities, which store entity information in-line directly with your content, enabling more contextual queries. MarkLogic Server will identify 18 different entities within your content, including people, places and things. Additionally, in order to ensure you have the full range of content enrichment options and tools you need to develop agile content applications, Mark Logic has also created the Open Enrichment Framework (OEF) to enable rapid integration of 3rd party entity extraction engines with MarkLogic Server.

Load content “as-is”

MarkLogic Server loads XML documents without requiring adherence to any predefined DTD or XML schema. This gives you the agility to develop content applications much quicker than approaches that require content to be standardized on a single schema.

Full-text search

MarkLogic Server provides the standard capabilities you’d find in a search engine, such as phrase, Boolean, proximity, wildcard, parametric, and range search capabilities. We also support language processing, such as stemming, thesauri, and spell-checking. You can expose simple “single box” query interfaces or more complex advanced query capabilities for users who want or need to perform research in your content.

Search and query

MarkLogic Server goes well beyond basic search by providing not only standard full-text search capabilities, but also database-style queries against content. Not only can you restrict search to any XML element or attribute (leveraging hierarchical structure), but you can also return the content of any elements as a result.

Geospatial

MarkLogic Server helps you take advantage of the geographic data in your content. MarkLogic Server has support for geo-encoding formats including GML, KML, and GeoRSS. XQuery functions allow you to search for content within bounding boxes, circles, and arbitrarily complex polygons anywhere on the globe. High-performance geospatial indexing enables you to perform real-time analytics and to visually explore content by integrating with geographic mapping applications like Google maps. This functionality can be easily combined with other advanced search and analytics functionality, such as a co-occurrence and full-text search.

Large-scale alerting

The MarkLogic Server alerting functionality has been designed to meet the needs of the most demanding organizations. Users can set up rules (queries) and actions that are triggered when relevant content is loaded into their system. This means that they get relevant information delivered to them faster and more efficiently than repeatedly searching the system. Efficient query serialization and high-performance indexing functionality enables the system to easily handle the large-scale alerting needs of today’s organizations. Rules can be based on key word search, geographic constraints, entities and even include constraints around the structure of information (e.g. tell me when the word “president” occurs in a footer or caption). Alerts can execute actions which can, amongst other things, deliver content to the web, email and mobile devices. The alerting capabilities are exposed via an alerting API and include a sample application so that organizations can start applying the alerting functionality very quickly.

Faceted navigation

With MarkLogic Server you can provide users with a rich interface for exploring their search results through faceted navigation. This allows them to drill down based on any number of “facets” to more quickly identify the information they are looking for. Facets can be a single value or a range of values providing them with buckets of related items and making it easier to explore information when there are a large number of results. The ranges can be dynamically defined at query time to provide maximum flexibility to users. For users unfamiliar with the contentbase, this directory-style browse interface allows them to discover previously unknown information.

Universal index

A query system is only as good as the indexes behind it. Like search engines, MarkLogic Server indexes the words within documents. Unlike search engines, MarkLogic Server also 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 whose title contains “Airbus”).

XQuery

MarkLogic Server provides the industry’s most extensive implementation of the W3C-standard XML Query (XQuery) language and fully supports the XQuery 1.0 recommendation. 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.

Content manipulation and transformation

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

Modular documents

Support for the industry standards of XInclude and XPointer let you more efficiently re-use content by efficiently including pieces of any document in another document. When included content changes, the inclusion may (optionally) change, so that modular documents are always up-to-date. Inclusions can be nested so that documents further increase the reuse and ability to centrally control information. These documents are dynamically generated and the resulting modular documents can be searched as an individual document and returned as a search result.

High availability

MarkLogic Server is architected to support your most mission critical content applications. The architecture delivers superior scalability while also providing failover, hot backup and other high-availability features. Database style journaling and transactional updates mean you can rely on MarkLogic Server to reliably store and deliver your high-value content to your users.

Auditing

MarkLogic Server makes it easy to monitor system activity by providing auditing functionality. Organizations can audit events such as document update, system shutdown, modifications of permissions, and user authentication to a log file. They can also filter the events they want to log — by user, by role, by outcome (success/failure), by event, and/or by document in order to speed analysis and understanding.

Automatic content conversion

MarkLogic Server offers integrated, automatic conversion of documents from popular formats—such as Microsoft Office, PDF and HTML—to XML. MarkLogic Server includes a content processing framework for customizable conversion and transformation services during content ingestion.