In the Autumn issue
Let me start with IRSG business. Udo has written his last post as Chair as a new Chair will take over after the AGM on 23 November. There have been no candidates to take on the Editorship of Informer so next year we are planning to publish just two issues (in April and November) in […]
From the BCS IRSG Chair
Welcome to this autumn issue of Informer from your Chair. Hopefully you had a spectacular summer (or winter if you happen to be in Australia) with plenty of sun (or snow) and perhaps some conference trips? Well, if your answer to the last point is ‘unfortunately not’, then maybe you should consider joining us at […]
IRSG AGM and Elections
The BCS IRSG Annual General Meeting (AGM) is scheduled to take place on Wednesday November 23rd at 6PM. The AGM will take place immediately following the close of Search Solutions 2022, which is being held at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue London EC2R 7BP. As with the Search Solutions conference, the […]
Informer in 2023
For most of its history Informer has been published four times a year. In 2023 the plan is to publish just two issues because efforts to find someone to take over the editorship have not been successful. I have agreed to continue to act as Editor but because of other commitments I can only commit […]
Search Solutions Conference 2022 – London, 23 November
Search Solutions 2022 will take place at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue London, EC2R 7BP, which is a 10 minute walk from either Liverpool Street or Moorgate Underground stations. Session 1: The Search Experience: Focus on the users 10:00 – 10:15 Introduction 10:15 – 10:45 Natasha den Dekker (LexisNexis) “How to conduct […]
Search Solutions Tutorials 2022 – London 22 November
The Search Solution Tutorials will take place at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue, London, EC2R 7BP. This is around a 10 minute walk from either Liverpool Street or Moorgate underground stations. Tutorial 1 – Full day IR From Bag-of-words to BERT and Beyond through Practical Experiments Sean MacAvaney (University of Glasgow) Craig […]
Perspectives on the EU Horizon DoSSIER Project
In this feature item there are three excellent contributions from members of the DoSSIER project. DoSSIER is an acronym for an EU Horizon 2020 ITN/ETN on Domain Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval There are three contributions from members of the project team A Summary of the First DoSSIER Training School, which took place […]
The evolution of Datafari, a European open source enterprise search application – Cedric Ulmer CEO
I have recently been asked for a customer to deliver an analysis of available open source solutions as a replacement to a decade old proprietary enterprise search solution. In this article, I wanted to share the outcome of this analysis, and to give an outlook of how we perceive the future of such solutions. As […]
Carlos Cuadra 1925-2022 A pioneer in commercial IR service development
Carlos Cuadra died in August this year. I doubt many readers of Informer will recognize the name but Carlos was a remarkable innovator in information retrieval in the 1960s and 1970s. Almost all his development work was carried out in a commercial environment, notably at System Development Corporation when it was spun out of RAND […]
The Book of Search – Book Review
Spoiler alert – this is a review of a book published in 2006! First a short history lesson. FAST Search and Transfer was founded in 1997 to commercialize search technology developed at the University of Trondheim. The subsequent history of FAST is difficult to untangle as the company seemed adept at delivering some very neat […]
A History of Enterprise Search 1938-2022
If you will exclude some self-promotion from the Editor, last month my book A History of Enterprise Search 1938-2022 was published under the PressBooks imprint of the University of Sheffield. If you have cause to doubt that there were any enterprise search initiatives in 1938 then you should certainly read this book. Enterprise search has […]
Books for search researchers and search managers
For some time now I have maintained a list of books on the Intranet Focus web site that I think would be of interest to search researchers and search managers. I am in the process of rebuilding the web site and so many of the internal links to reviews of the books will no longer […]
Events Autumn 2022
Note from Andy Macfarlane, the compiler – Due to the COVID-19 pandemic some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details. One Day Events Search […]
And finally….!
As I undertake my daily scanning of the research papers on information retrieval, I continue to be impressed with the level of innovation that I see. Clearly significant advances are being made into many areas. My concern is how these advances are going to feed into search products that are going to make a commensurate […]
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