Grant’s Grunts: Lucene Edition

Forgive my silence for a few days.  We are in the process of moving to North Carolina (although I am keeping my job at CNLP.)  After I get settled in there I think it will be nice to think about things other than moving, such as Lucene!

Help us decide whether to move Lucene to Java 1.5 by voting for which JVM/JDK you are using at http://www.quimble.com/poll/view/2156.

Ooh boy, I guess this is real now.  I just did my first real commit to Lucene of Issue 545 in JIRA. 545 adds in the ability to customize how Fields get loaded when retrieving a document and introduces the concept of lazy field loading, which is useful for when large amounts of data are [...]

sheikhsa has written a step by step installation of the Lucene demo, which should help new users wanting to get started on Lucene. Also check out my ApacheCon talk for additional demo capabilities related to term vectors and span queries. It uses Maven, so it is a little bit different to install, but there are [...]

Eran at hellonline.com has done some interesting experiments using Lucene and Lingpipe from Alias-i.  Approaches like this can enhance a user’s search experience, although sometimes there is a cost to be paid in performance.

A few people have a new proposal for the Lucene community; it is called Lucy and is a C based implementation of Lucene for use in Perl and Ruby.

My proposal for a presentation on Lucene has been accepted for OSCON Europe.  I will be talking on term vectors, advanced querying and Lucene performance tuning.  The conference is in Brussels September 18 through the 21st.

Much has been written on how to use Lucene and much has been written on the theory of information retrieval. Lately, I have been brushing up on my theoretical understanding of IR in the context of Lucene. Despite the fact that Lucene seems quite complicated (inverted files, nested boolean, prefix, range, proximity queries, span queries, [...]

The Server Side has some more fuel for the ongoing debate on the Lucene development mailing list on the move to Java 1.5.  Seems like a poll should be taken to see what people have installed and whether they are interested in moving to Java 1.5. I think part of the issue is due to [...]

Woo Hoo!  I made my first commit to Lucene.  You can see it on the Who We Are page.