The entire Flax technical team spent the day at the European Bioinformatics Institute yesterday discussing an exciting new project we’ll begin this coming September, BioSolr. Funded by the BBSRC this collaboration between Flax and the EBI aims “to significantly advance the state of the art with regard to indexing and querying biomedical data with freely available open source software”. Here we are with Dr. Sameer Valenkar and Gautier Koscielny of the EBI.
The EBI, located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus near Cambridge, maintains the world’s most comprehensive range of freely available and up-to-date molecular databases and is already using Apache Lucene/Solr extensively, for example in the Protein Databank in Europe which indexes over 100,000 items derived from experimental research – but this is just one of the many complex collections they provide. The BioSolr project will run for a full year, during which members of the Flax team will work directly with the EBI team to run workshops, demonstrate and document best practises in search application design, create, improve and extend open source software and learn a lot about the specialist search requirements of bioinformatics. This is a fantastic opportunity for us to push the boundaries of what is possible with Solr and associated software, to work with some incredibly rich data and to do all of this in the open to encourage collaboration from the wider software and biology communities.
We’ll be creating various open resources (software repositories, Wikis, blogs) to support the project later this year – do let us know if you would like to be involved and we will keep you informed.
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