Better search for life sciences at the BioSolr Workshop, day 2 – Elasticsearch & others

Over the last 18 months we've been working closely with the European Bioinformatics Institute on a project to improve their use of open source search engines, funded by the BBSRC. The project was originally named BioSolr but has since grown to encompass Continue reading

Better search for life sciences at the BioSolr Workshop, day 1 – Apache Lucene/Solr

          Over the last 18 months we've been working closely with the European Bioinformatics Institute on a project to improve their use of open source search engines, funded by the BBSRC. The project was originally named BioSolr but has since grown to encompass Continue reading

The fun and frustration of writing a plugin for Elasticsearch for ontology indexing

As part of our work on the BioSolr project, I have been continuing to work on the various Elasticsearch ontology annotation plugins (note that even though the project started with a focus on Solr - thus the name - we have also been developing some features for Ela...Continue reading

XJoin for Solr, part 1: filtering using price discount data

In this blog post I want to introduce you to a new Apache Solr plugin component called XJoin. I'll show how we can use this to solve a common problem in e-commerce - how to use price discount data, provided by an external web API, to either filter the results of a product search or boost scores. A further post will show another example, using click-through data to influence the score of subsequent searches.

What is XJoin?

...Continue reading

BioSolr at BOSC 2015 – open source search for bioinformatics

Matt Pearce writes: I spent most of last Friday at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) Special Interest Group meeting in Dublin, as part of this year's ISMB/ECCB conference. Tony Burdett from EMBL-EBI was giving a quick talk about the BioSolrContinue reading

BioSolr begins with a workshop day

Last Thursday we attended a workshop day at the European Bioinformatics Institute as part of our joint BioSolr project. This was an opportunity for us to give some talks on particular aspects of Apache Lucene/Solr and hear from the various teams there on how they are using the software. The workshop was oversubscri...Continue reading

BioSolr – building better search for bioinformatics

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”. Continue reading