Many times, clients ask us to help them estimate memory usage or disk space usage or to share benchmarks as they build out there search system. Doing so is always an interesting process, as I’ve always been wary of claims about benchmarks (for instance, one of the old tricks of performance benchmark hacking is to “cat XXX > /dev/null” to load everything into memory first, which isn’t what most people do when running their system) …
| Monday, 15 August 2011 | ||
| 18:00 | to | 21:00 |
If you’re in the central VA, or even in the northern VA / DC area, come join us for the inaugural “Charlottesville Solr and Lucene Meetup”. Charlottesville is home to the co-authors of Manning’s “Lucene in Action” and Packt’s Solr “Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server” books. This area is a hotbed of search activity thanks to NGIC and DIA calling Charlottesville home, and the many gov’t subcontractors …
| Tuesday, 12 July 2011 | to | Friday, 15 July 2011 |
I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to speak at Überconf last week in the Denver, CO area. 
The annual conference is organized by Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff, Just Stuff fame. Überconf has the same top-notch quality, at a grander scale – 10 concurrent tracks (woah!), full day pre-conference trainings (mobile, anyone?), food (full breakfast! that’s a REAL hearty bonus!), and …
Back in the 1990′s, Carnegie Mellon University developed the Capability Maturity Model, a scale for determining how prepared a contractor’s processes were for a particular task. If you’ve ever written software for anyone but yourself, you’ll recognize some of these definitions, which call to mind the famous characterization of the evolution of software.
Sensis, “the search engine for Australians”, uses a modified version of this model to assess their own search processes. It …
Lucid Imagination founder Marc Krellenstein kicked off the Lucene Revolution yesterday with a keynote address covering the history of search. Here are the slides, followed by some highlights:
Much as we might think of search technology as a 21st century internet thing, its back to when IBM was sued by the US government. By the early days of the Internet, search—Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, and Alta Vista–began to accelerate the virtuous cycle of requirements and innovation. …
Imagine that you have to integrate and search data from 200 different sources, each of which uses a different structure (if they use a structure at all). Your data may be incomplete, the same information is represented in different ways by different sources, and it’s often vague. Oh, and if a user can’t find the correct result using a simple Google-like search, someone may literally get away with murder.
Welcome to Ronald Mayer’s world. In …
It wasn’t the biggest lesson learned from Alberto Mijares’ talk on Day 2 of Lucene Revolution, but the notion that funding issues can lead to a new and successful business model was uplifiting, at the very least.
Slides for this session:
When Mijares’s company, Canoo Engineering AG, met with Swiss newspaper publisher and media group Axel Springer, they all agreed that what Axel Springer needed was to keep readers on the sites of …
You’ve been hearing me do a lot of talking about finding meaning in data, so it may not come as a surprise that of all the track sessions at Lucene Revolution, perhaps the one I was looking forward to the most was the one I attended last, “Lots of Facets, Fast“, from Anne Veling.
Here are the slides for this session.
“Metadata is king!” Thus proclaimed Steve Kearns of Basis Technology, Platinum Sponsor of Lucene Revolution, at the start of this standing-room-only session on Day 1 of the conference. Why? Because it provides a way to enhance otherwise unstructured data with a considerable amount of structure.
Here are the slides for this session.
With this premise in place, Steve discussed the use and integration of advanced analytics in the document-processing pipeline, focusing on the three levels …
What a way to start out a conference on using data! Stephen Dunn’s keynote for Day 1 of Lucene Revolution — the Guardian‘s opening up of its content using an API, and how Lucene/Solr was involved in that — was interesting all by itself, but he himself is also a good speaker, engaging the audience. A great way to start the day. Here’s a video clip of his interview: