Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
over the content, typically using a variety of different visualisation
approaches for simple, end-user interaction.
14.3 Open source search technologies
Working with small volumes of data is relatively simple and a wide
variety of search solutions can handle this requirement. When dealing
with an index of millions of scientifi c abstracts, there can be issues with
time; both in terms of indexing content and also speed of retrieval. Many
search platforms were investigated, but SOLR stood out as it provided
robust results in milliseconds.
SOLR [1] was developed as part of the Apache Lucene project. It
provides a search platform that is fast, easy to implement and potentially
enterprise capable. It has been adopted by a widening number of
mainstream organisations including AT&T, AOL, Apple, IBM,
Ticketmaster, Ebay, NASA and Netfl ix. The best-known example of
SOLR in action is the purchase of goods on Amazon, where on selection
of an item, the user is provided with a series of alternatives that other
people who had bought that item had also purchased. This is SOLR's
optimised faceted search in action.
The searching capabilities that AstraZeneca have used at present
include:
■
powerful full-text searching - including searching for exact text, text
with slight spelling errors and logical functions (e.g. AND, OR and
NOT);
■
key word searching, that can be linked with text searching (e.g. search
for documents that contain the word 'cancer' and are written by a
given author);
■
faceted searches - quickly provide a list of all the 'facets' associated
with a search (e.g. provide a list of the authors for the documents
returned in a given search, and the number of documents that they
have authored - without having to run through all the documents
individually).
SOLR also has a number of other features that allow future integration
into our enterprise IT, including:
■
database integration. This is especially useful when the documents
indexed need to be annotated after they have been indexed. If an
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