The environment:

• Small group of academics and associated support producing mostly individual research on a specific topic in economics dispersed across individual machines.
• Overlap, real and potential, in common resources - mostly data (flat files - Stata binary and text) and Stata (proprietary statistical package) code; but also documents, teaching materials, bookmarks, utilities, etc.
• Local *nix server (only our group has access since we own it) available to store files, run programs on respective user home folders with individual permission controls.
• The major issue: Collaboration is a touchy thing where faculty are in competition with each other for tenure - certainly no "proprietary" (either paid for or those generated over a long period of time) resources will be shared.

The goal: Make an easy way for faculty and support to share non-proprietary data/other resources in home folders on the local server which can be indexed and searched, retrieving relevant metadata (for data files this would hopefully include the source, a short description, variable names, geographic and time coverage...) and file location on the server (a link, say).

I'm looking at rolling my own Perl solution for the indexing and search but obviously need a way for non-programmer contributors to provide the relevant meta-data. I'm also more than open to open source solutions but from what I've found so far what's mostly out there is for database-driven commerce and nothing like what I'm after. Also, since data is mostly in Stata binary it would be difficult to inspect it with Perl, especially since the only Stata modules on CPAN can read Stata 8 and 10 files, where we've been using Stata 9 for the last couple of years. In other words, auto-generating the metadata would be downright difficult (since nothing's impossible, of course).

You may have noticed that I didn't say "web front-end" for the search since I have no idea if this is the best solution, a local application may be better. You may also think that I'm way over my head but I'm eager to use this project as a learning exercise. Any help or pointers is greatly appreciated :)

Update:Thanks to shmem for pointing out Swish-e, which looks like the ideal solution especially with Perl customization for reading weird data formats like Stata. Thanks also to moritz for pointing out beagle and KinoSearch but Swish-e looks like the most straightforward option.

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