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 to two issues. One of these commitments is specifying a new publishing platform for Informer – if you have any suggestions from your own experience please let me know. I must emphasis the word ‘experience’.

There will be a Spring issue published in late April 2023 that will provide an initial report on ECIR 2023 and a detailed report on Search Solutions 2022. There will be an Autumn issue published in late October that will set out the programme for the Search Solutions Tutorials and Conference in late November.

If a new Editor does come forward then it may be possible to publish additional issues in 2023. We will review the situation towards the end of 2023 and very much hope that it will be possible to revert to the quarterly cycle, or even to a completely different publishing model if someone is willing to take on the task.

Martin White

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 Macdonald (University of Glasgow)
• Nicola Tonellotto (University of Pisa)

Tutorial 2 – Morning
Approaching Neural Search with Apache Solr and Open-source technologies

• Alessandro Benedetti (CEO @ Sease Ltd, Apache Lucene/Solr Committer, Apache Solr PMC Member)

Tutorial 3 – Afternoon
Simplifying NLP researchers work with Datafari Open Source

• Julien Massiera (France Labs)
• Cedric Ulmer (France Labs)

Tutorial 4 – Full Day
Diverse Approaches to Systematic Searching

• Dr Farhad Shokraneh (Institute of Health Informatics, University College London)

Ticket costs

(Prices quoted include VAT and booking fees.)

Tuesday 22 November 2022 – Tutorials

BCS Members: £80.00
Non-Members: £95.00
Students: £65.00

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/search-solutions-2022-inc-tutorials-information-retrieval-sg-tickets-433482236037

Refunds/Cancellations

We will issue a refund, excluding fees, if a cancellation is received within 14 days of the booking date or by noon on Monday 21 November 2022; otherwise, name substitutions will be allowed after this date.

BCS is a membership organisation. If you enjoy this event, please consider joining BCS. You’ll be very welcome. You’ll receive access to many exclusive career development tools, an introduction to a thriving professional community and also help us Make IT Good For Society. Join BCS today.

For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event, please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters.

COVID-19

BCS is following government guidelines and we would ask attendees to continue to also follow these guidelines. Please go to https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/ for more information, advice, and instructions.

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 a disclaimer, be aware that I am the CEO and cofounder of France Labs, the company developing Datafari, and this is important since Datafari was part of the solutions analyzed, and obviously this puts a potential bias on my considerations.

As an introduction, let me define what we mean by Enterprise Search in this particular context: it is about proposing a solution that can index many document sources within an information system, without prior knowledge about the working context (and yes, this is bad for UI optimization and relevancy), that allows employees to type in textual queries in a search bar, and that displays the search results as a vertical list together with facets. In addition, this must be done securely, which means it should come with connectivity to AD/LDAP for authentication, and with the capacity to respect the documents level permissions when users are searching (i.e. only display what users are allowed to see). Orthogonally to these functional aspects, Enterprise Search solutions must also provide administration capabilities, in terms of configuration and exploitation.

Continue reading “The evolution of Datafari, a European open source enterprise search application – Cedric Ulmer CEO”

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 search technology and raising question-marks about its accounting practices. The end-game was the acquisition of the company by Microsoft in 2008 for $1.2 billion, followed by an inquest about the extent of the due diligence that was mirrored a few years later with HP’s acquisition of Autonomy. The core of the company lives on as the Microsoft Technology Centre in Oslo and a global group of alumni who worked for the company and left to either work for other companies or start their own business.

FAST was also very good at marketing. One of the outcomes was The Book of Search published in 2006. The quality of the content and the presentation of this 142pp book are both exceptional. To quote from the Introduction

Continue reading “The Book of Search – Book Review”

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 exist. I have now revised the list so that the links are to the web sites of the publishers and so should stand the test of time.

If there are any books that you feel should be included, please email me with your suggestions.

The list is in reverse chronological order of publication, going back to 2010. There are of course many earlier books, notably Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning, Raghavan and Schutze but I had to stop somewhere. The earliest book on my bookshelf is An Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval by none other than Gerard Salton and Michael McGill, published in 1986.

Continue reading “Books for search researchers and search managers”

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 advance in the findability experienced by employees in their daily work. To use the metaphor of building a house, there seem to be endless suggestions for the design of kitchens, bedrooms, patios and bathrooms but no one is considering whether there is any combination that makes a house a home and takes into account that people have different visions for what they regard as an acceptable compromise taking into account their long terms plans and the current (and continuing) high levels of interest.

Continue reading “And finally….!”