Doug Turnbull
Category: Conference
If youd like to catch up with us and youre in Europe, theres few better places to hear what were all about than at one of our talks at Lucene Revolution! Were happy to be presenting three talks that really highlight the kinds of skills, tools, and philosophy we bring to search applications:
Test Driven Relevancy – How to Work with Content Experts to Optimize and Maintain Search Relevancy
Presented by Doug Turnbull, Search & Big Data Architect, OpenSource Connections Rena Morse, Director of Semantic Technology at Silverchair Information Systems
Getting good search results is hard; maintaining good relevancy is even harder. Fixing one problem can easily create many others. Without good tools to measure the impact of relevancy changes, theres no way to know if the “fix” that youve developed will cause relevancy problems with other queries. Ideally, much like we have unit tests for code to detect when bugs are introduced, we would like to create ways to measure changes in relevancy. This is exactly what weve done at OpenSource Connections. Weve developed a series of tools and practices that allow us to work with content experts to define metrics for search quality. Once defined, we can instantly measure the impact of modifying our relevancy strategy, allowing us to iterate quickly on very difficult relevancy problems. Get an in depth look at the tools we utilize when we not only need to solve a relevancy problem, we need to make sure it stays solved over the products life.
This blog post will give you a nice preview – in this talk well be highlighting our relevancy testing and collaboration product Quepid.
Building Client-side Search Applications with Solr
Presented by Daniel Beach, Search Application Developer, OpenSource Connections
Solr is a powerful search engine, but creating a custom user interface can be daunting. In this fast paced session I will present an overview of how to implement a client-side search application using Solr. Using open-source frameworks like SpyGlass (to be released in September) can be a powerful way to jumpstart your development by giving you out-of-the box results views with support for faceting, autocomplete, and detail views. During this talk I will also demonstrate how we have built and deployed lightweight applications that are able to be performant under large user loads, with minimal server resources.
Implementing a Custom Search Syntax using Solr, Lucene, and Parboiled
Presented by John Berryman Data Architect, OpenSource Connections
In a recent project with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Opensource Connections was asked to prototype the next generation of patent search – using Solr and Lucene. An important aspect of this project was the implementation of BRS, a specialized search syntax used by patent examiners during the examination process. In this fast paced session we will relate our experiences and describe how we used a combination of Parboiled (a Parser Expression Grammar [PEG] parser), Lucene Queries and SpanQueries, and an extension of Solrs QParserPlugin to build BRS search functionality in Solr. First we will characterize the patent search problem and then define the BRS syntax itself. We will then introduce the Parboiled parser and discuss various considerations that one must make when designing a syntax parser. Following this we will describe the methodology used to implement the search functionality in Lucene/Solr. Finally, we will include an overview our syntactic and semantic testing strategies. The audience will leave this session with an understanding of how Solr, Lucene, and Parboiled may be used to implement their own custom search parser.
I hope youll come by and visit us in Dublin!