By definition, document boosting is anything but a “one size fits all” phenomenon, observes Tim Potter of National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in his talk on “Boosting Documents in Solr by Recency, Popularity, and Personal Preferences” on Day 1 of Lucene Revolution. Slides for this session. Tim’s talk outlined a number of innovative and improved approaches to boosting documents… > read more

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… > read more

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,… > read more

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’… > read more

As Josh Tuberville of eHarmony explained in the intro to his talk on Day 1 of Lucene Revolution “Jazzed about Solr: People as a Search Problem” (what a great double entendre the title of this session turns out to be! ), Jazzed.com is a new offering from eHarmony, currently in the final stages of development. Here are the… > read more

Sometimes the best way to explain what something is involves first discussing what it is not, and that’s the tack that Otis Gospodnetic used to open his Day 2 presentation “Search Analytics: What? Why? How” at Lucene Revolution, Day 1. Here are the slides for this session. Search analytics” is not search engine optimization (SEO), nor is it exactly… > read more

“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… > read more

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… > read more

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 > read more

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… > read more

As hundreds of Lucene/Solr users and developers descend on San Francisco next week for Lucene Revolution 2011, it’s a great opportunity to show everyone else what you’re seeing – especially for the people who wanted to be at the conference but couldn’t make it. To make life simpler, you can post your pictures on line to Flickr using the conference… > read more

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,… > read more

Marc Krellenstein, Lucid Imagination Lucid Imagination founder Marc Krellenstein kicked off the Lucene Revolution yesterday with a keynote address covering … > read more

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… > read more

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”,… > read more

Any way to get session slides?

Ramesh Balasubramanian: Looking for the same....I know the location was displayed in the first presentation....I missed it :(

Michael Bohlig: We will start to post them to the agenda page this week: http://lucenerevolution.com/agenda

Michael Bohlig: The slides we have received are posted here: http://www.lucidimagination.com/events/revolution2010 We'll add more as we get them.

To the Lucene Revolution attendees, speakers, and sponsors: a big thank you for your support. The energy, content, and feedback were great - the weather even cooperated! We will be posting the presentations this week on the agenda page. Once we have the eval forms rolled up we'll post some highlights. Let us know if you have any closing comments or questions.

Heard from the grapevine that the Lucid Imagination/Basis Technology reception tonight at 6:30pm will include the following menu. It sounds yummy. Hope to see everyone there. - Freshly Prepared Pasta served with Hand Shaved Parmesan, Cracked Black Pepper and Assorted Breads - Ziti in Pomodoro Sauce with Artichokes - Tortellini in Four-Cheese Cream Sauce with Sweet Grilled Sausage and Vegetables - Orecchiette in Cognac Cream Sauce with Grilled Chi... [read more]

Eric Pugh: I'm definitely getting hungry! Sounds great!

Here are some ideas on East Boston restaurants (see http://www.urbanspoon.com/n/4/314/Boston/East-Boston-restaurants for more details): Santarpio's Pizza, Belle Isle Lobster and Seafood, and Scups in the Harbor. Of course jumping on the water taxi across the harbor opens up many options in the waterfront, Faneuil Hall, Back Bay, and North End areas. See the Best of Boston 2010 list at http://www.bostonmagazine.com/restaurants/display/best_restaur... [read more]

Cassandra Targett: Just to clarify, Belle Isle is great, but it's not really a restaurant. There's a counter inside, but otherwise it's take out. And Santarpio's is a standard pizza place - excellent pizza, but decidedly not fancy (worth a trip though!).

Tina Lieu: If you are visiting Boston and like to eat, don't miss out on the North End. In particular, I recommend the cannoli at Mike's Pastry (300 Hanover St. between Prince St & Wesley Pl) which is open until quite late (10pm weekdays and 11pm Fri. & Sat.). ... [read more]

We’re happy to be platinum sponsor of this exciting event. I’m personally looking forward to several of the talks. Come visit us for a free T-shirt or 4GB USB stick and see a demo of the “global listening platform”built based on Solr, which our Steve Kearns will speak about at 11:30am today.

I'm pleased to announce that Stefan Olafsson and I have just launched a brand new initiative this morning from the Lucene Revolution conference room: http://SearchMeetups.com/ We've been organising a search meetup in London for the past year now, and have been enjoying it so much that we wanted to encourage others to do the same. If you're interested in getting together with other search practitioners in your area, why not start a meetup of your ... [read more]

If you have not seen it, Hossman is putting on a stump the chump session. We are still looking for great Solr questions to throw his way. If you have an interesting question that might challenge the mighty Hoss, please, send it our way. There are prizes I'm told! Read more at: http://bit.ly/stump-hoss If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reply right here as well. Que Hossman to stop reading now if he stumbles this way in the cas... [read more]

Johannes Goll: Hi Chris, Usually a facet search returns the document count for the unique values in the facet field. Is there a way to return a weighted facet count based on a user-defined function (sum, product, etc.) of another field? Here is a sum example. Assum... [read more]

Download the Lucene Revolution eGuide at: http://lucenerevolution.org Or grab it below. Includes the full schedule, abstracts, speaker & sponsor info, and logistics.

I would like to see at the Solr training as to what is the end result of indexing a document. I am still confused about this whole process and it is so important for me to undetrstand in order to use Solr for Search in out organization. Thanks, Jayant

... Read all 4 comments ...

Tom Hill: Hi Jayant, We do talk about the indexing process in the class. Do you have specific questions that you'd like to have covered? Tom

jayant: Yes. I see from the participants profile that many of them have already used Solr, which makes me wonder about the pace of the training for novices such as me. What I would ideally like to see is a an end to end set up with an IDE such as myeclipse, ... [read more]

Tom Hill: We do walk through using the data import handler, and java code to create indexes. Unfortunately, we won't have a chance to build a gui in myeclipse, we'll be sticking more closely to Solr specific issues. And for parsing things like word documents, ... [read more]

For everyone’s perusal, here are links to my Lucene Revolution interviews with Eric Gries (mastermind of the Lucene Revolution conference) and Otis Gospodnetic (Lucene developer and author of "Lucene in Action") which I featured in my blog Beyond Search this past July. I think you will enjoy these lucid interviews. http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2010/07/27/exclusive-interview-eric-gries-lucid-imagination/ http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2010/07/13/l... [read more]

Please join us on Thursday evening from 6:30-8:00PM for The Revolution Reception co-sponsored by Basis Technology and Lucid Imagination. There will be drinks and light refreshments served. So put on your revolutionary gear and we'll throw some tea into Boston Harbor!

We've got some great presentations lined up for the Lightning Talks session on Thursday from 5:00-6:30PM. If you would like to do your own 10 minute talk, send an email to info@lucenerevolution.com with your proposed title & abstract.

For lunch on October 7 & 8 we will have tables set up by topic, so that you can join a group to discuss and share knowledge on key issues of interest. Some ideas we have are: geospatial, scalability & performance, CMS integration, faceting, and foreign languages. What Lucene/Solr topics would you like to discuss over lunch?

... Read all 5 comments ...

Eric Pugh: I've been mulling over coming up with a Elements of Solr Adoption based on the same ideas as the Elements of CI document: http://www.anthillpro.com/html/resources/elements_of_ci_USLetter.pdf I have found that the Elements of CI is a great way of visu... [read more]

Peter Wolanin: What works well as an add-on for Geospatial for Solr 1.4.1, and what will be easily accessible in Solr 3.x

Tom Burton-West: Scalability & performance: With a very large documents but a smaller total number of documents (6 million full-text books)we have the same problem with latency. We don't want the 99th percentile queries to time out.

The conference looks like an exciting event.

As part of the Lucene Revolution, we’re offering a social network where attendees can meet and connect before the event. … > read more

Lucene Revolution may very well be the birthplace of the next generation of open source enterprise search. Don’t get left … > read more