Today, it was 20 years ago that Adam Dickmeiss and I founded Index Data together in Copenhagen. There was a bottle of champagne, and our parents shared the moment with us along with our wives, because, honestly, we were little more than big kids at the time. We were a little scared, but we were […]
Previous post: Using Smart Widgets to Integrate Information Access This is the second in a series of posts about our Smart Widget platform. You can also read the first post or find background material about the technology. In our introduction to Smart Widgets, I said that part of our purpose in developing the technology was […]
Next post: Adding Discovery and more to Koha with Smart Widgets. This is the first of a series of blog posts in which we will talk about a concept that we have been developing over the past few years. We call it ‘smart widgets’ to distinguish our approach to widgets from the almost ubiquitous notion […]
One of the problems we’ve had over and over at Index Data is that we build all these cool back-end tools — things like the metasearching middleware Pazpar2 — but then don’t have a good way to show them off. We’ve never really focussed much on building UIs, so we have to do demos that […]
We’re in the business of making access to information easier for people and, most of all, for SOFTWARE that in turn makes that information available to people. A lot of our software is based around a kind of switchboard or functional ‘hub’ model which means that when we extend a capability in ONE area, new […]
If you are a Java shop looking to build web sites on top of Pazpar2 or our MasterKey platform, then MasterKey JSF (mkjsf) could be just the tool to kick-start your project. You know your J2EE and Ajax, and you might be considering JavaServer Faces for your UI development. Or maybe you have already developed […]
It’s always fun to see someone do something really neat with your software. This elegantly designed search interface for Asia studies makes excellent use of Pazpar2. I particularly like the clever use of a bar chart for the date facet. Nice work!
Most of the science of Information Retrieval centers around being able to find and rank the right set of documents in response to a given query. We spend much time arguing about technical details like ranking algorithms and the benefits of indexing versus broadcast searching. Every Information Professional I know both deifies and fears Google […]
We are often asked about where we stand on the discussion of central indexing versus broadcast metasearching. Our standard answer: “You probably need some of both” always calls for further explanation. Some time ago, I wrote this up for a potential business partner. If it sounds a little like a marketing spiel… guilty as charged. […]
spent most of last week up in Edinburgh, for the Open Edge conference on open-source software in libraries, attended mostly by academic librarians and their technical people. It was an interesting time, and I met a lot of interesting people. At the risk of overusing the word “interesting”, it was also of interest to see how widespread […]