The summit ended with some pow wow’s on whether more meetings should be planned and what common problems people are having and focuses of such meetings. It was determined that many libraries and related fields are playing with Lucene and it would likely be worthwhile to have some sort of gathering. Some notes:

  • Generalibility is an issue. Many projects have very specific problems and may be hard to generalize. Also budget and time constraints.
  • Newspapers - many are digitizing, content types can be quite broad
  • Structured versus unstructured data - major hurdle for many
  • Common formats? Should there be crosswalks?
  • Federated and Distributed searches also a concern. Standards for fields and indexing?
  • FOAF - connections between users
  • Spam - problem with user created data in index
  • Social Software - metacrap, unapi, crosswalks created by users
  • Lire - alternative ways to search - serendipity
  • Piggy-bank and other "portable apps". How long until someone can launch a lucene index from a thumb drive. There is already a portable apache and desktop tomcat.

While the discussion centered around problems it was decided that it would likely be worthwhile to have something at either SuperConference or Code4Lib. The idea of an “install fest” would also be useful where people would bring in a computer or have access to a remote server and they would be walked through getting a lucene/solr install running and possibly moving some of their data into it.

I then jumped on the road and back to america for some more beer.