Are You Ready To Stump The Chump?

Once again I’ll be in the hot seat for a Stump The Chump session at Lucene Revolution 2012. We’ll be announcing the judges and prizes soon, but in the mean time you can go ahead and submit your Solr and Lucene questions to stump[AT]lucenerevolution.com .

If you aren’t familiar with what a Stump The…

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Lucene Revolution 2012 – Call for Participation now open!

Mark your calendars today! The largest worldwide conference dedicated to Lucene and Solr will take place in Boston May 7-10.

The 2012 conference will build on the success of last year’s Lucene Revolution in San Francisco. Sponsored by Lucid Imagination with additional support from community and other commercial co-sponsors, we’ll be adding new sessions, new speakers, and new training sessions…

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Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady: Finding the right questions in order to create meaning in big data

Maybe you’ve heard pundits say that in the next year, humans will create more data than in all of human history. The problem with those predictions, Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk said in his keynote to Day 2 of Lucene Revolution, is that they’re true.

Here are the slides for this session:

Ultimately, he says, that is…

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They type it how? Anuenue, mixi, and the difficulties in Japanese spell-check

The first part of Takahiko Ito’s talk on Day 2 of Lucene Revolution was interesting, but the second half introduced me to a problem — and a serious one — that I hadn’t even known existed.

Slides for this session:

Ito, of Japan’s social network mixi, first described the tool mixi had built, Anuenue,…

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AT&T: Solr as middleware

I’ve been doing a lot of talking about how search is about more than finding data; it’s about understanding it. And it might almost be conventional wisdom to suggest that application of search to the big piles of data and content boils down to ‘know thy data’. But add the other vital piece of software insight — ‘know thy user’…

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BeyondTrees and the New York Times: Using Lucene to build a time machine

You’ve been hearing me do a lost 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…

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More like this: from semantics to new business model for Canoo and Axel Springer

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

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Solr and law enforcement: highly relevant results can be a crime

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…

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Stephen Dunn and the Guardian: How being open makes them better

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…

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The scientific approach to search at Sensis

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”,…

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