This week we held another Lucene/Solr London User Group event, kindly hosted by Barclays at their funky Escalator space in Whitechapel. First to talk were two colleagues of mine, Matt Pearce and Tom Winch, on the BioSolr project: funded by the BBSRC, this is an opportunity for us to work with bioinformaticians at the European Bioinformatics Institute on improving search facilities for systems including the Protein Databank in Europe (PDBe). Tom spoke about how we’ve added features to Solr for autocompleting searches using facets and a new way of integrating external similarity systems with Solr searches – in this case an EBI system that works with protein data – which we’ve named XJoin. Matt then spoke about various ways to index ontology data and how we’re hoping to work towards a standard method for working with ontologies using Solr. The code we’ve developed so far is available in our GitHub repository and the slides are available here.
Next was Upayavira of Odoko Ltd., expert Solr trainer and Apache Foundation member, with an engaging talk about Solr queries. Amongst other things he showed us some clever ways to parameterize queries so that a Solr endpoint can be customized for a particular purpose and how to combine different query parsers. His slides are available here.
Thanks all our speakers, to Barclays for providing the venue and for some very tasty food and to all who attended. We’re hoping the next event will be in the first week of June and will feature talks on measuring and improving relevancy with Solr.
