Verity Inc. has announced the immediate availability of Verity Federator version 2.0. Highlights of the new release include a Web Services interface for heterogeneous and multiple search applications, as well as enhanced security capabilities. Verity Federator is a universal search platform that is designed to provide secure and unified access to relevant information from virtually any content source across an organization and beyond. A Java infrastructure with a public application programming interface (API), the latest Verity Federator release includes new and enhanced features that allow users to get unified access to content, while allowing customers to avoid the labor-intensive consolidation of Web sites, applications, and other information sources.

Features include: a Web Services interface that brings together multiple search systems, including Verity's K2 and Ultraseek enterprise search products, as well as third party search mechanisms; the ability to apply, in real time, Verity K2's capabilities, such as summarization, classification, and recommendation to any vendor's search products; enterprise-strength security to ensure that the existence of documents and their contents are made known only to designated individuals; and dynamic filtering, merging, and re-ranking of search results with multiple viewing options.

The Federator's new Web Services interface enables developers to integrate multiple search engines across virtually any application, Web site, or information source into a universal platform. Using SOAP and XML standards, the Federator Search API allows developers to leverage their Web Services programming environment to simultaneously search multiple content repositories, without worrying about proprietary interfaces. For example, with this new capability, any enterprise portal can now be connected to non-Web Services-enabled systems via the Verity Federator's Web Services interface. Search results from multiple content sources can be merged, ranked, and presented to the users. The product also provides a user interface that can display several views of search results in a variety of languages.

Verity Federator comes equipped with pre-built "Workers" to access Verity Ultraseek indices and Verity K2 collections, enhancing search relevancy in applications powered by Verity. In addition, the product's open architecture and JAVA Client API allow developers to build custom applications as well as Workers to access virtually any application or repository.