If you are a hard core programmer, you've no doubt hear of Stack Overflow.   It is a great place to ask questions and get them answered by a community of programmers.

It is much better than a discussion board, because it is not for discussions.  It is for questions and answers.  Kind of like a cross between a FAQ and a wiki.   

So, I was on a Linked-in community discussion board, answering a question about spam on the board and it came to me that there should be a Stack Overflow for Enterprise Search.    

Apparently, getting a community started is no trivial task.   So, I ask you to do me a favor and check out http://enterprisesearch.stackexchange.com  Look for some unanswered questions and answer them yourself if you can - or enter a new question.   

The questions can be about any search engine or other related functionality (taxonomy tools, recommendation engines, filters, crawlers, internationalization, entity extraction, etc).  

Applied Relevance announces the immediate availability of the AR product suite.   This release includes many enhancements,  new features and bug fixes.

AR.Taxonomy

AR.Taxonomy is a windows tool for authoring and managing taxonomies.   It is designed to be easy to use yet powerful. 

The AR.Taxonomy tool has undergone a complete refactoring of code to make it more responsive and efficient.  Here are some highlights:

- The background services are more efficient and have idle detection logic to prevent them interfering with normal forground processing.

- A new Find Node feature allows you to quickly locate nodes in the taxonomy tree.

- The preview pane is more robust, and more appropriatedly reflects the current UI state.

- A new object model for .artx files makes importing and exporting of taxonomies from different systems more efficient.

- Tested on Vista and Windows Server 2008 in addition to XP and Windows Server 2003.

AR.Server

AR.Server has been renamed from AR.Pipeline in previous releases.   This Windows service is a taxonomy server that decorates documents in any repository with powerful taxonomy metadata based on document content.  

- Support for caching of taxonomy and node counts in the server itself.

- Improved performance.

- New WCF-based API decouples modules from .Net dependency.

- Support for relevance enhancements in search results.

AR.WebParts

The AR web parts taxonomy visualization components have been greatly enhanced from the previous version.

- New TaxonomySearchResults web part builds on CoreSearchResults and adds the ability to render results from the internal web service in addition to the core object model.

- TaxonomyNavigator component now has more options for counting nodes and provides new flexible display methods.

Applied Relevance, in partnership with WAND, Inc and Oracle have created DataFocus for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search. 

New DataFocus for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides a data model for unstructured information. It helps users find the information they need faster. It gives context to the cloud and saves you money.

DataFocus SES is the combination of curated taxonomies from WAND, Inc, enterprise taxonomy management software from Applied Relevance and a connector to the Oracle enterprise search engine.

Please contact us for a personal demonstration of how DataFocus can help you find the information you are looking for.