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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A practical approach to Boosting Documents with Solr/Lucene

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…

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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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Solr/Lucene at the heart of the search for love

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…

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Search analytics: a window into how users actually search

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…

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Integrating Advanced Text Analytics into Solr/Lucene

“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…

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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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