Last Friday we hosted a hackday featuring Elasticsearch in Cambridge, following a similar event last year focused on Apache Lucene/Solr. Around 20 people attended from organisations working in sectors including analytics, digital music, bioinformatics and e-commerce, and all the Flax team were there as well.
We started with a brief presentation on Elasticsearch and asked around the room for any data collections we might be able to use. Lee from Elasticsearch (the company) had brought collections of UK crime data and the complete works of Shakespeare; we also had several million rows of digital music metadata, Wikipedia edit data for all UK MPs (to follow last year’s theme!) and several years of data describing Premier League football. Unlike our Solr hackday where each team worked on the same general task, this time we split into four different teams who worked on all of the above except the Wikipedia edits. We’d also been provided with a very high-performance Elasticsearch cluster by BigStep for our use, which meant it was very quick to index the above data and start working with it.
By lunchtime (the food was sponsored by Elasticsearch, who also provided stickers, plush ELKs and lollypops – thanks guys!) we had some very basic information about the various datasets – such as which scene in which Shakespeare play has the most characters on stage (the answer is 21 in Richard III), and which football teams seemed to gain the most advantage from playing at home. Note that we had already moved beyond basic search functionality to use Elasticsearch as an analytic platform, answering particular questions, using features such as aggregations.
We continued during the afternoon to develop the various applications and finished with a ‘show and tell’. Some of the teams had managed to develop user interfaces for Elasticsearch, the most polished being a clickable Google Map that would show you which types of crime were significantly above and below the national average for the area you selected – unsurprisingly in Cambridge, stolen bicycles were very common! By the end of the day, everyone had gained experience of Elasticsearch, some for the first time. We finished the day, as is traditional, with a swift pint and further networking.
Thanks to Cambridge Business Lounge (a highly recommended co-working space) for the venue, BigStep for hosting and Elasticsearch for sponsoring lunch and providing the swag, and of course to all who attended. We’ll return with a further Cambridge Search Meetup soon!
