The Challenge:
The IRIS Center at Peabody College in Vanderbilt University operates under a very large federal grant to provide curriculum, materials and resources for teachers of students with disabilities. They wanted to create a search engine for people to access to their database of website resource and special education information. The IRIS center didn't want a tradition keyword search engine; instead they grouped all of their material into specialized categories to make it easier for education professionals to find what they need. They also wanted to flag certain material as "Best Of", ensuring that the most useful information got displayed at the top of the search results. Finally, they wanted an administrative website to manage their searchable resource information, update their category criteria, and create CD versions of the website.

The Solution:
The most challenging part of the project was designing a fast, efficient algorithm to search for resource information when a user might choose any number of available categories. We stored category information in XML and used complex client-side javascript code to display category lists in the search form. Then we used Microsoft's Data Shaping technology to create large hierarchical recordsets containing search results and "Best Of" information, displaying these recordsets as search results to the user.

Finally, we designed and develop an administrative website allowing IRIS Faculty to manage administrator accounts, resource information, "Best Of" information, and searchable categories. We created a comples tool to programatically search the website for every combination searches and save the results onto a CDROM version of the directory.

The Outcome:
Due to the enormous success of the web resource directory, we continue to work with Vanderbilt on exciting web projects to benefit their federal grants.