Breakfast Links 19.01.2009

* Search & Deploy

Interesting article regarding semantic search being the basis of lots of scifi applications used in star trek etc – also worth reading for non IT insider. Doesn’t the Google Android reminds you on the good ol’ Star Trek Tricoder (picture above!)?

* Open Source Search & Search Appliances Need Expert Attention

Article on enterprise search concerning the need of a search expert or even better, a specialized search company. I totally share the opinion of Lynda Moulton “I am going to put my confidence in the industry to spawn a whole new category of search service organizations“.

* Open Source NLP and Search Engine Libraries Updated

A useful collection of open source search and text processing tools!

Breakfast Links 14.01.2009

* Information Builders (Schweiz) AG übernimmt spezialisiertes Search–Team von fast, A Microsoft Subsidiary

Information Builders (ch) just acquired a 2 person team from FAST to build its new search excellence team. Their current product iWay Enterprise Index is an Enterprise Search solution and being built upon GSA and Lucene. Does anyone has any details about this combination of GSA and Lucene?

* HDFS Reliability

Tom White from Cloudera (company from US with a business model around Apache Hadoop) released a paper about the reliability of HDFS with some useful recommendations on the productive use of it.

* Enterprise Search 2008 Wrap-Up

Lynda Moulton (The Gilbane Group) with a short summary on Enterprise Search in the year 2008. Including business developments at the big players (Microsoft and FAST, IBM and OmniFind), search/text mining technologies and a lot of interesting company names in the field of Enterprise Search and beyond.

* New Stuff in Lucene and Solr

Solr insider Grant Ingersoll about the development of new hot stuff for Apache Solr. I’m really excited about the SpatialSearch feature which provides some kind of geo search (there was also an introduction of local search by Chris Hostetter at ApacheCon 2008 here).

Breakfast Links 08.12.2008

* Arnold White Study Published

Galatea published the study “Successful Enterprise Search Management” by Stephen E. Arnold (Beyond Search) and Martin White (Interview at ArnoldIT). The study is essentially about how to manage an enterprise search environnement, beginning from the selection and integration of a vendor and how a project team is setup. There are also some chapters about search and technology in general like content processing (text mining). I don’t know yet wether it makes sense to get the study for businesses in germany but will write a report on it!

* Tika and Solr

Grant Ingersoll just committed an ExtractingRequestHandler module for Solr which adds Tika support to solr. Meaning, it is now possible to feed Solr with a variety of common document formats like Office, PDF, HTML and more. Awesome!

I wasn’t able to write any Breakfast Links since monday due to projects (like the upcoming relaunch of this blog), birthday parties and efforts for christmas presents (big, big family)! Finally I turned on my news reader today…

* Amazon Launches Public Data Sets To Ease Research

Amazon (AWS) provides public data sets to demonstrate use cases for their (cloud) services. The article on TechCrunch also links to Swivel which is a repository for open data sets. Unfortunately you won’t find any textual data but a lot of data like U.S. Census, historical oil prices, world photovoltaic production and more.

* New Open Source Search Vendor

An interview of Hans-Christian Brockmann (Brox IT-Solutions GmbH) about Brox Open Source strategy in the field of enterprise search. Really interesting is Brockmann’s number of 180.000 lucene projects (more or less productive) out there! Brox already came up with their Eclipse project SMILA, which is going to be a base architecture to better integrate search and text mining into common systems. Nice to hear from those kind of projects in my business area!

* Z! – Episode 134: Qimaya – Anwendung neuronaler Netze (german)

Interesting interview with Roy Uhlmann (Qimaya aka former Queap) about neuronal networks in their search engine Qimaya. If you are interested in testing Qimaya you can request access to the demo – next invitation and access delivery is even today! As I can see, Qimaya is currently a german language only project!

Breakfast Links 28.11.2008

* You are a knowledge worker. Become a knowledge hero.

I just discovered the belgium company Whatever which launched a software in the field of knowledge management called Knowledge Plaza. Knowledge Plaza is focused on Enterprise Social Search methods which are roughly described here by a Whatever employee. Under the hood, Knowledge Plaza uses Apache Lucene core for Search (?) and Aperture for text extraction.

* Hadoop Map-Reduce – Tuning and Debugging

Just stumbled upon this overview for tuning and debugging Hadoop.

Breakfast Links 27.11.2008

I took some days off from blogging and just finished my dozens of unread RSS items.

* How the Semantic Web Will Change Information Management

Three predictions from fumsi about the role of the semantic web in the information management field. Those three predictions are not only about the topic of the semantic web in detail but describe how the semantic web could support models like the “push search paradigm”. In my opinion the semantic web is only manageable if you have tools supporting you, since “taxonomies” and models are in permanent change.

* Two Paths For Information Management Pros In An Economic Downturn

Matthew Brown on the upcoming challenges on Information Management in the current economic downturn.

* The Google Search Appliance Gets a Newsletter

Funny title which points more to Google’s efforts in the enterprise sector (GSA virtual edition) but also to the GSA newsletter availability.

Breakfast Links 12.11.2008

* Search 2009: The Arnold Boye08 Lecture

Stephen Arnold from Beyond Search about his speech in Aarhus, Denmark at the JBoye08. Stephen pointed out major trends of the enterprise search industry, gave 5 examples of important companies (Clearwell Systems, Coveo, Exalead…) in the field and showed off the importance of Microsoft SharePoint in the business. He even published his lecture on the speech in his blog post – you should read it! Again I really appreciate Stephen Arnold’s ideas and how he acutally shares it!

* Tao and the Art of Search: Yin Yang and TF-IDF

A nice explanation of the TF-IDF concept in search. Keep it, the day will come when you have to explain TF-IDF for n-th time

Breakfast Links 31.10.2008

* Birds Of A Feather Sessions (BOFs) in New Orleans

BoF sessions on the ApacheCon are informal gatherings of persons interested in a particular topic. Grant Ingersoll from Lucene proposed two sessions, one on Apache Machine Learning (Mahout, UIMA) and one on Apache Search (Lucene, Nutch, Search). I would have increased the counter, unfortunately I’m not going to New Orleans this year… But maybe it is possible to retrieve some experiences from those sessions after the event!

* Mozenda Web Data Extraction: Quick Review

According to the article on BS last week I performed a short review of Mozenda Web Data Extraction. Check out my very first experiences with it!

Breakfast Links 22.10.2008

* In Search of Answers: Enterprise Search and the High-Performance Business

Accenture just released an article on Enterprise Search and defines it as it is, as also what is coming in future like multimedia search capabilities and sentiment analysis.

* Classifying Images Part 2: Basic Attributes

As Accenture already defined multimedia search capabilities of being one big thing in the future, Synaptica Central released Part 2 of an article series on classifying images. In this article, Ian Davis describes which image metadata is going to be used for background information (creator name, image series, location) on a certain image.

P.S.: Alex just told me he had enough of the good ol’ english breakfast, will try to provide more variety on those images now!