April Meetup - BioSolr, JOINs and Ontologies & a Solr Query Deep Dive

Note we have a lot to fit in so please arrive in good time for a 6.30pm start!

Our first talk will be given by Tom Winch and Matt Pearce of Flax on the BioSolr (http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2014/06/11/biosolr-building-better-search-for-bioinformatics/) project - our publically funded collaboration with the European Bioinfomatics Institute (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/). Dr Sameer Velankar (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/people/sameer-velankar) of the EBI will introduce the project.

As part of BioSolr we've developed various patches and add-ons (https://github.com/flaxsearch/BioSolr) for Solr (all of which are open source of course!). These new features include a way to filter, boost and join queries using external similarity data ('XJoin'), a new Solr faceting parameter which filters returned facet values on whether they contain a given string, and methods for indexing and querying using ontologies (with added SPARQL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL)). Matt and Tom will describe how we're helping the EBI to use these new features for searching the rich and fascinating world of biological data - and how you might use them in your own projects.

Our second talk will be by Upayavira (http://odoko.co.uk/upayavira/) who has been teaching training courses with Lucidworks (http://www.lucidworks.com) since 2010. Through this, and his contracting and consulting work, has seen a wide range of use-cases for Solr. More recently he has been rewriting the Solr Admin UI using AngularJS, with the hope it makes innovation and improvement more straight-forward.

Upayavira will be leading a Solr Query Deep Dive, an (optionally) hands-on, in-depth look at querying - bring a laptop with Solr 5 installed if you can. We will look at the full range of queries (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Query+Syntax+and+Parsing) available in Solr, how to combine multiple query parsers in one request, the use of local parameters to configure multiple queries. To make this interesting, you are encouraged to heckle (politely!) and to bring your own querying issues, as your real use cases will make the exploration of Solr querying all the more interesting.

We'll also have an opportunity for a Q&A with Solr committers and general networking - drinks and food will be provided courtesy of Barclays!