Watson Explorer Engine is an enterprise search platform that enables developers or administrators to create search applications that are tailored to their business requirements. Watson Explorer Engine consists of a number of executables and libraries, written in C and Java, that crawl, transform, index, and display data using instructions and configuration information that are specified in XML. Some of these executables provide services that are continuously available on servers where Watson Explorer Engine is installed, while others are only invoked while retrieving (crawling), transforming, and indexing data. The locations that should be crawled, how this data should be converted into XML, the information that should be indexed in various forms, and how search results are displayed is stored in XML nodes that are themselves stored in a customer-specific, centralized XML resource file known as the repository. From a developer's point of view, a Watson Explorer Engine search application is typically defined as a complete, related set of XML components.
End-user Watson Explorer Engine applications are typically created using the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool, a graphical, platform-independent application that runs in a web browser. This tool makes it easy to create and manage search collections, to start, stop, and monitor all the Watson Explorer Engine services, to define how data and queries are processed, and to design the search result interface, among other tasks.
Watson Explorer Engine applications can also be written using the Watson Explorer Engine Application Programming Interface (API) through SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or REST (Representational State Transfer). Creating applications using the Watson Explorer Engine API is discussed in detail in Getting Started with the Watson Explorer Engine API.