Denn gerade im Bereich von spezifischen Such-Lösungen prescht Lucid Imagination – “die Firma um Apache Lucene” – im US-amerikanischen Markt voran. Nachdem sich Apache Lucene in den vergangenen 10 Jahren (Achtung, Jubiläum im März!) zu einem defacto Standard Such-Framework entwickelt hat, stellt Lucid nun die Entwicklung von Infrastruktur und Interoperabilität in den Vordergrund. Genau diese Themen hat Lucene bzw. Solr auch bitter nötig um in Zukunft auch im Enterprise Search Bereich mit den “Gatekeepern” Microsoft, Oracle und Autonomy konkurrieren zu können.

Angst um die kommerzialisierung von Apache Lucene durch Lucid ist meiner Meinung nach unangebracht, auch das neue “Lucene Connector Framework” soll unter der Apache Foundation entwickelt werden.

The Lucene Connectors Framework (LCF) is an effort to provide build and support an open source framework for connecting to content repositories like Microsoft Sharepoint and EMC Documentum, amongst others via a single API.

Die Entwicklung des Connector Frameworks könnte letztendlich ein wichtiger Meilenstein für Lucid, aber auch alle anderen Anbieter werden, die Apache Lucene/Solr in ihren Produkten einsetzen.

The registration to ApacheCon Europe 2009 (23-27 March) in Amsterdam was opened last week. I already spent some time watching the available sessions regarding Hadoop, Lucene etc., have a look…

• Hadoop Tools and Tricks for Data Processing Pipelines
• Lucene Boot Camp
• Solr Boot Camp
• Introduction To Hadoop
• Introducing Mahout: Apache Machine Learning
• Hadoop Map-Reduce: Tuning and Debugging
• Lucene Case Studies
• Pig – Making Hadoop Easy
• Advanced Indexing Techniques with Apache Lucene
• Running Hadoop in the Cloud
• Configuring Hadoop for Grid Services
• Dynamic Hadoop Clusters
• Best of breed – httpd, forrest, solr and droids

As you can see, Apache Hadoop is playing a big role this year, and cloud computing starts to take off at Apache too. Unfortunately I didn’t find any Nutch related sessions – whats happening there?

* 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!

Breakfast Links 06.11.2008

* What’s new with Apache Solr

A worth reading article from Grant Ingersoll on Apache Solr 1.3 at IBM developerWorks. Beside the introduction to Solr, it covers the new features since 1.3 like the Import Handler (from Databases, Filesystem, RSS etc.), Similarity Search and the concept of Distributed Search.

* Updating and Deleting Documents in Lucene 2.4

Lingpipe on the enhancements of document deletion in Lucene and their solutions. Their explanation of the IndexWriter and IndexReader of Lucene is a bit too late to me though!

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!

Solr 1.3 final was released today, congratulations to the development team!

This release ships with a lot of new features:

• Distributed search capabilities
• Supporting multiple indexes in one deployment (this means also multiple languages in one deployment)
• Chained search components (More Like This, Spell Checking, etc.)
• The new DataImportHandler to import easily from Database to Solr

Solr 1.3 also comes with an updated Lucene version 2.3 which means significantly faster indexing performance.

I was already playing around with the release candidate and started writing some reviews, my first review on how to handle multiple indexes in one deployment is following soon here!

By the way, Solr is still missing a new logo: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/LogoContest

Mail from Marcus Herou on the SOLR mailing list:

Glad to announce that I finally managed to move this package out of the
company code and released it to the OS community. The package contains some
neat classes which we use for instance when indexing and searching through
some hundred thousands of blogs and the ShardedSolrDocumentIndexer will be
used frequently now when we will index the entire Blogosphere.

Check it out at http://dev.tailsweep.com

I’m going to check it out on tuesday evening!

Breakfast Links 05.09.2008

A Solr 1.3 Release Candidate is available! Grant Ingersoll: “Note, this is NOT an official release, but is pretty close”.
http://people.apache.org/~gsingers/solr/1.3-RC2/

Autonomy: Not Idle
http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/09/05/autonomy-not-idle/ (Beyond Search)

I just stumbled upon a mail on the solr mailing list from Grant Ingersoll writing that Solr 1.3 could by released already this week!

Barring anything major, it should be out this week or early next.  We’ve published one Release Candidate so far, and another one will be available today.  I have been announcing this on solr-dev, but have held back on making a broad announcement just yet.

-Grant