ECIR 2017 Industry Day, our book & a demo of live TV factchecking

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Charlie Hull

I visited Aberdeen before Easter to speak at Industry Day, a part of the European Conference on Information Retrieval. Following a reception at Aberdeen's Town House (a wonderful building) hosted by the Lord Provost I spent an evening with various information retrieval luminaries including Professor Udo Kruschwitz of the University of Essex. We had a chance to discuss the book we're co-authoring (draft title 'Searching the Enterprise', designed as a review of t...Continue reading

Innovations in Knowledge Organisation, Singapore: a review

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Charlie Hull

I'm just back from Singapore: my first visit to this amazing, dynamic and everchanging city-state, at the kind invitation of Patrick Lambe, to speak at the first Innovations in Knowledge Organisation conference. I think this was probably one of the best organised and most interesting events I've attended in the last few years. The event started with an enthusiastic ...Continue reading

Free file filters, search & taxonomy tools from our old Googlecode repository

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Charlie Hull

Google's GoogleCode service is closing down, in case you hadn't heard, and I've just started the process of moving everything over to our Github account. This prompted me to take a look at what's there and there's a surprising amount of open source code I'd forgotten about. So, here's a quick rundown of the useful tools, examples...Continue reading

Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, Washington DC

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Charlie Hull

Last week I attended Enterprise Search & Discovery 2014, part of the KMWorld conference in Washington DC. I'd been asked to speak on Turning Search Upside Down and luckily had the first slot after the opening keynote: thanks to all who came and for the great feedback (there are slides available to conference attendees, I'll publish them more widely soon, but this talk was about me...Continue reading

Clade – a freely available, open source taxonomy and autoclassification tool

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Charlie Hull

One way to manage digital information is to classify it into a series of categories or a heirarchical taxonomy, and traditionally this was done manually by analysts, who would examine each new document and decide where it should fit. Building and maintaining taxonomies can also be labour intensive, as these will change over time (for a simple example, just consider how political parties change and divide, with factions appearing and disappearin...Continue reading

Outside the search box – when you need more than just a search engine

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Charlie Hull

Core search features are increasingly a commodity - you can knock up some indexing scripts in whatever scripting language you like in a short time, build a searchable inverted index with freely available open source software, and hook up your search UI quickly via HTTP - this all used to be a lot harder than it is now (unfortunately some vendors would have you believe this is still the case, which is reflected in their hefty price tags). However we're increasingly asked to develop features ...Continue reading

Posted in Technical | Tagged big data, entity recognition, machine learning, open source, sentiment analysis, taxonomy | Leave a reply

Search Solutions 2011 review

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Charlie Hull

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I spent yesterday at the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group's annual Search Solutions conference, which brings together theoreticians and practitioners to discuss the latest advances in search. The day started with a talk by John Tait on the challenges of patent search where different units are concerned - where for example a search for a plastic with a melting poin...Continue reading

Posted in Events | Tagged archive, enterprise search, events, media, microsoft, networking, ontology, pipeline, SOLR, taxonomy, yahoo | 1 Reply

London Enterprise Search Meetup – Databases vs. Search and Taxonomies

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Charlie Hull

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Back to London for the next Enterprise Search Meetup, this time featuring Stefan Olafsson of TwigKit and Jeremy Bentley of Smartlogic. Stefan started off with a brief look at relational databases and search engines, and whether the latter can ever supersede the former. He talked about how modern search tech...Continue reading

Posted in Meetups | Tagged database, events, google, NoSQL, SOLR, taxonomy | 1 Reply

Legal search is broken – can it be fixed with open source taxonomies?

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Charlie Hull

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I spent yesterday afternoon at the International Society for Knowledge Organisation's Legal KnowHow event, a series of talks on legal knowledge and how it is managed. The audience was a mixture of lawyers, legal information managers, vendors and academics, and the talks came from those who are planning legal knowledge systems or implementing them. I also particularly enjoyed hearing from <...Continue reading

Posted in Events, Legal | Tagged events, law, legal, lucene, open source, SOLR, taxonomy, xapian | 2 Replies