The Welsh Clinical Portal is a classic example of how a search engine can be used to bring together huge amounts of data. Many records are still paper based and electronic records are created across different applications, hospitals and GP practices. The Welsh Clinical Portal allows hospital clinicians to easily find and view essential healthcare information such as medication details and referral notes.

The system itself has been designed to handle up to 300 million documents and will be constantly updated with the thousands of new items added every day. Solr provides powerful and accurate search and fast response times.

As their recent newsletter notes, “this is considered to be the first time Solr has been applied to a health enterprise architecture on a national scale”. We’re seeing increasing adoption of open source software in the healthcare domain, with a recent development being NHS England’s creation of the Apperta Foundation to help manage the adoption of new open source applications that can easily be extended and re-used with no license fees payable. The Welsh Clinical Portal is a great example of what can be achieved with open source software while reducing costs – an essential consideration for a publicly-funded healthcare organisation.

If you need help designing, building or supporting applications based on Solr, for healthcare or any other application, do get in touch.

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Next up were Hans-Josef Jeanrond of Sinequa and Steve Woodward of AstraZeneca, a return visit after an excellent presentation by Steve’s colleague Nick Brown last year. AstraZeneca have a committed approach to search led directly by their CTO office, running hackathons, pilots and larger projects to rapidly deliver a raft of applications built on their core search platform. One key feature was delivering ‘cards’ in some cases – like Google, a calculator ‘card’ when a maths query is entered, or a calendar when someone asks about booking meetings. AstraZeneca are also building mobile apps, including a ‘people search’ that allows one to call or email with a single click. It’s great to see a large company putting significant resources into enterprise search and the benefits this can bring.

Dayle Collins of PwC and Vince McNamara of Dahu were next with a talk about PwC’s Exalead-powered enterprise search across a range of business-critical content. Dayle talked about how analysis and interviews were carried out to identify recurring search patterns in the business and identify a strategic focus and Vince then explained some of the technical features developed, including custom relevance ranking. Interestingly, entity extraction is also used at query time to classify which type of query a user has entered – are they asking about a company, product or employee for example. They mentioned how a ‘gold standard’ for search relevance is being developed – it seems this is being recorded in spreadsheets currently: perhaps they should consider a more interactive tool.

The next talk came from Ian Williams of NHS Wales Informatics Service who are building a large scale patient record service using Apache Solr. Ian explained the pressures facing the NHS (austerity, difficulty with staffing, ageing populations) and how patient records are currently distributed across a number of locations and sometimes still paper-based. This exciting project (which should be an example both the the rest of the NHS and other healthcare providers) uses Solr to create a single Welsh Clinical Portal, where healthcare providers can find information on 3 million patients in 135 hospitals and 400 GP practices across Wales. We’ve been lucky enough to work with Ian’s team on this project in a small way and it was very exciting to find out more details and hear about their future plans.

After lunch, Lesley Holmes of Nottinghamshire County Council told us about how they have attempted to improve search by focussing on metadata quality – using tools from ConceptSearching to automatically apply tags. Their content is spread across many servers and often duplicated but improving search can be have huge value to their users, who often provide services for vulnerable people where accurate and up-to-date information is essential. Cedric Ulmer of FranceLabs was next, describing with Alban Ferignac of the IFCE a project to replace Exalead with Apache Solr. Interestingly this talk contained some concrete numbers – Exalead was costing €75,000 plus a €15,000 support fee for a maximum of 6 million documents (their target is 50m), with updates costing even more, and IFCE were finding it difficult to obtain reactive support. The open source Solr (supported by a worldwide community and under constant development) gave them far more flexibility, no effective limit on the number of documents indexed and the migration process cost only €15,000 – as clear an indication of the benefits of open source search as I have seen.

Next I ran a roundtable discussion on implementing open source search which was well-attended and interactive – we discussed search engine pipelines for indexing thousands of sources amongst other subjects, and the discussions continued well after we had to vacate the room! I had to rush off soon afterwards to run the evening Meetup at a local pub, where I demonstrated the Quepid search relevance tool we’ve been using for client projects recently.

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October brings the biggest event in the Lucene/Solr calendar, Lucene Revolution in Austin, Texas, a 4-day event with training and a conference. We’re happy to announce that Alan Woodward and Matt Pearce from Flax will be presenting “Searching the Stuff of Life: BioSolr” about our work with the European Bioinformatics Institute where we’ve been developing Solr features for use by bioinformaticians (and any others who find them useful of course!), for example ontology indexing and external JOINs.

A week later we’ll be at Enterprise Search Europe, where I’ll be delivering the keynote on The Future of Search (you can see an earlier version of this talk from the IKO Singapore conference last month). We’re also running a Meetup on the evening of the 20th open to both conference attendees and others – an informal chance to chat with other search folks. During the conference itself I’m particularly looking forward to hearing from Ian Williams of NHS Wales on Powering the Single Patient Record in NHS Wales with Apache Solr – this is a very large scale and exciting project using Solr for healthcare data.

Looking further ahead, in November we have plans to attend (and possibly speak) I’m speaking on Test Driven Relevancy at Search Solutions 2015, a great one-day event in London which I highly recommend, and we are planning another event running a workshop on Taming Enterprise Search in Singapore together with a partner. As ever, do let us know if you would like to meet up at an event and talk open source search!

The post Open source search events roundup for late 2015 appeared first on Flax.

Next was CTO and co-founder of Linguamatics, Dr David Milward, who described his company’s capability in text mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and search. He described the challenges of extracting ‘concepts’ from text – how words and acronyms with multiple potential meanings are difficult to parse automatically without contextual knowledge. Linguamatics’ approach has been described as ‘Agile NLP’ and allows the quick development of new patterns for concept extraction. A powerful example he gave was how by specifying a relationship between two entities, in this case one company acquiring another, structured data can be extracted from unstructured text. Other examples focused on the medical and bioscience field (a particular interest of ours at present due to the upcoming BioSolr project) and showed how their software can cluster facts and find connections between disparate pieces of data (‘which X relates to Y via Z’). This process can also be used to generate new facets for searching from free text, including for numeric ranges, and these can even be tailored for different user groups. It’s clear that Linguamatics are experts in this area and David’s talk was of great interest to many in the room, including several from the European Bioinformatics Institute.

We finished with the usual chat, networking and drinks. Thanks to both our speakers – and do let me know if you have a suggestion for a presentation at a future event!

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