We have some news! From February 1st 2019 Flax's Managing Director Charlie Hull will be joining OpenSource Connections (OSC), Flax's long-standing US partner, as a senior Managing Consultant. Charlie will manage a new UK division of OSC who will also acquire some of Flax's assets and brands. OSC are a highly regarded organisation in the world of search and relevance, wrote the seminal book Continue reading
It won't have escaped your notice that factchecking is very much in the news recently due to last year's political upheavals in both the US and UK and the suspected influence of fake news on voters. Both traditional and social media organisations are making efforts in this area; examples include Channel 4 and Faceboo...Continue reading
I'll be speaking at several events over the next few weeks, in the UK and abroad. On the 19th of November I'll be at the FIBEP World Media Intelligence Congress in Vienna, to talk about how we helped our client Infomedia migrate from a closed-source search engine (Autonomy IDOL and Verity) to a new platform based on Apache Lucene/Solr<...Continue reading
I've always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian ...Continue reading
I've just seen an article titled Enterprise Search: 14 Industry Experts Predict the Future of Search which presents a list of somewhat contradictory opinions. I'm afraid I have some serious issues with the experts chosen and the undeniably blinkered views some of them have presented. Firstly, if you're going to ask a set of experts to write about Enterprise Search, don't choose an expert in SEO as part of your list. SEO is not Enterprise Search, in fact a lot of the time it isn't anything at ...Continue reading
I spent yesterday afternoon at UCL for ISKO UK's event on Taming the News Beast - I'm not sure if we found out how to tame it but we certainly heard how to festoon it with metadata and lock it up in a nice secure ontology. There were around 90 people attending from news, content, technology and academic organisations, including quite a few young journalism...Continue reading
I'm not going to comment on the various financial aspects of the recent news about HP's write-down of the value of its Autonomy acquisition - others are able to do this far better than me - but I would urge anyone interested to re-read the documents Oracle released earlier this year. However, I am going to write about the IDOL technology itself (I'd ...Continue reading
There have been some very encouraging noises recently about increased use of open source software by the UK Government: for example we've seen the creation of an Open Source Procurement Toolkit by the Cabinet Office, which lists Continue reading
The blogotweetosphere has been positively buzzing since last night's announcement that Hewlett Packard will be buying Autonomy for £7.1bn, while divesting itself of its PC business. Many commentators have put a positive spin on this, pointing to Autonomy's meteoric rise from a small office in Cambridge to the behemoth it is today....Continue reading
There's a lot of buzz currently around the UK government and its approach to IT projects (which has been historically rather poor in terms of delivery, schedules and cost). We've writt...Continue reading
