About Us

This is the official website for the Lucene Dutch User Group. The goal of this web site is to support the activities of the user group and server as a central access point to all the group activities and related (Dutch) Lucene community work.

Why a user group

In the last 3 years we've witnessed the rise of open source enterprise search. Of course it was always there, and Lucene in particular was there since, well... the previous century. But in the last 3 years the interest in this area has grown dramatically and the install/user base of the different Lucene related projects (Lucene Java and Solr in particular) has grown at an amazing rate. Today, the Lucene ecosystem is booming - there's a high demand for expertise in this field yet still relatively low supply. The Lucene/Solr mailing lists are flooded with hundreds of questions each week and the need to share knowledge is evident. These are our main reasons to start this user group. The goal is to provide a platform to share knowledge in a structured manner.

Expected activities

There are many activities we hope to promote via this usergroup:

• Discussions - Provides a platform for open discussion related to open source search and Lucene related project in particular. To facilitate these discussions, we have set up several web forums. All you need to do is sign up, log in, and visit our Forums page.
• Events - Organize and publish related events in Holland and centralize the registration for these events. The goal is to have a periodic user group meetup (once a month or once every two months) where everyone who's interested in the subjects can participate and share knowledge. Beyond these meet-ups we also hope that more external events will take place which we'll be able to promote in this website. For more information please visit our Events page.
• Trainings - We will centralize all Lucene related trainings in The Netherlands and promote them in this site. Read more...
• Blogs & Articles - Again, it's all about providing a central access point for related information. We will use this website to aggregate relevant Blogs and help promote published articles on the related subjects.

Who's behind it?

JTeam
The work on this user group is primarily sponsored by JTeam. To read more about JTeam please visit the About JTeam page.

Uri Boness
I am a software architect at JTeam with over 9 years of Java development experience. My interest in open source search solutions started around three and half years ago as I discovered the potential power of enterprise search in general and Lucene in particular. As part of my work in JTeam I developed a handful of search solutions answering our clients demands which included the facetsearch framework - a home grown framework to enable faceted classification on top of the common free text search functionality. With the rise of Solr, we quickly abandoned facetsearch and focused our efforts to build expertise in Solr and support its development. Today, I lead JTeam's enterprise search solutions efforts for providing expert open source search solutions based on Apache Lucene projects. I'm a strong believer in knowledge sharing, and as such I try to be active in the lucene community as much as possible by participating in mailing lists, committing patches, and speaking in conferences. Together with our remarkable team of developers, we're trying to push these technologies forward by developing extensions and complementing products (see Solr Explorer).

My other professional passion is RIA development using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). But to be completely honest, my greatest passion of all is to practice fatherhood with my two beautiful children (Daan & Lian).

Chris Male
Since coming to JTeam I have had the opportunity to work with Lucene and Solr in a number of projects and have developed a real passion for Open Source Enterprise Search. Of particular interest of mine is how Lucene and Solr can be extended to support geo-spatial search – finding results that are within the radius of a certain point. This kind of search differs greatly from typical free-text searches and presents many challenges I find fascinating, particularly how to perform such a complicated search in a timely manner. As such I am an active developer to the Spatial Lucene and Local Solr and I regularly write blog entries on the topic.

Outside of software development my main interests are sports of all kinds, and you can usually find me supporting a team from my native country New Zealand.