Category: Autumn 2022

Let me start with IRSG business. Udo has written his last post as Chair as a new Chair will take over after the AGM on 23 November.   There have been no candidates to take on the Editorship of Informer so next year we are planning to publish just two issues (in April and November) in… Continue reading In the Autumn issue

Welcome to this autumn issue of Informer from your Chair. Hopefully you had a spectacular summer (or winter if you happen to be in Australia) with plenty of sun (or snow) and perhaps some conference trips? Well, if your answer to the last point is ‘unfortunately not’, then maybe you should consider joining us at… Continue reading From the BCS IRSG Chair

The BCS IRSG Annual General Meeting (AGM) is scheduled to take place on Wednesday November 23rd at 6PM.  The AGM will take place immediately following the close of Search Solutions 2022, which is being held at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue London EC2R 7BP.    As with the Search Solutions conference, the… Continue reading IRSG AGM and Elections

For most of its history Informer has been published four times a year. In 2023 the plan is to publish just two issues because efforts to find someone to take over the editorship have not been successful. I have agreed to continue to act as Editor but because of other commitments I can only commit… Continue reading Informer in 2023

Search Solutions 2022 will take place at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue London, EC2R 7BP, which is a 10 minute walk from either Liverpool Street or Moorgate Underground stations. Session 1: The Search Experience: Focus on the users 10:00 – 10:15 Introduction 10:15 – 10:45 Natasha den Dekker (LexisNexis) “How to conduct… Continue reading Search Solutions Conference 2022 – London, 23 November

The Search Solution Tutorials will take place at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue, London, EC2R 7BP. This is around a 10 minute walk from either Liverpool Street or Moorgate underground stations. Tutorial 1 – Full day IR From Bag-of-words to BERT and Beyond through Practical Experiments Sean MacAvaney (University of Glasgow) Craig… Continue reading Search Solutions Tutorials 2022 – London 22 November

In this feature item there are three excellent contributions from members of the DoSSIER project. DoSSIER is an acronym for an EU Horizon 2020 ITN/ETN on Domain Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval There are three contributions from members of the project team A Summary of the First DoSSIER Training School, which took place… Continue reading Perspectives on the EU Horizon DoSSIER Project

I have recently been asked for a customer to deliver an analysis of available open source solutions as a replacement to a decade old proprietary enterprise search solution. In this article, I wanted to share the outcome of this analysis, and to give an outlook of how we perceive the future of such solutions. As… Continue reading The evolution of Datafari, a European open source enterprise search application – Cedric Ulmer CEO

Carlos Cuadra died in August this year. I doubt many readers of Informer will recognize the name but Carlos was a remarkable innovator in information retrieval in the 1960s and 1970s. Almost all his development work was carried out in a commercial environment, notably at System Development Corporation when it was spun out of RAND… Continue reading Carlos Cuadra 1925-2022 A pioneer in commercial IR service development

Spoiler alert – this is a review of a book published in 2006! First a short history lesson.  FAST Search and Transfer was founded in 1997 to commercialize search technology developed at the University of Trondheim. The subsequent history of FAST is difficult to untangle as the company seemed adept at delivering some very neat… Continue reading The Book of Search – Book Review