Exclusive Interview with Steve Cohen, Basis Technology
September 21, 2010
The Lucene Revolution is a few weeks away. One of the featured speakers is Steve Cohen, the chief operating officer of Basis Technology. Long a leader in language technology, Basis Technology has ridden a rocket ship of growth in the last few years.
Steve Cohen, COO, Basis Technology
I spoke with Steve about his firm and its view of open source search technology on Monday, November 20, 2010. The full text of the interview appears below:
Why are you interested in open source search?
The open source search movement has brought great search technology to a much wider audience. The growing Lucene and Solr community provides us with a sophisticated set of potential customers, who understand the difference that high quality linguistics can make. Historically we have sold to commercial search engine customers, and now we’re able to connect with – and support – individual organizations who are implementing Solr for documents in many languages. This also provides us with the opportunity to get one step closer to the end user, which is where we get our best feedback.
What is your take on the community aspect of open source search?
Of course, open source only works if there is an active and diverse community. This is why the Apache Foundation has stringent rules regarding the community before they will accept a project. “Search” has migrated over the past 15 years from an adjunct capability plugged onto the side of database-based systems to a foundation around which high performance software can be created. This means that many products and organizations now depend on a great search core technology. Because they depend on it they need to support and improve it, which is what we see happening.
What’s your take on the commercial interest in open source?
Our take, as a mostly commercial software company, is that we absolutely want to embrace and support the open source community – we employ Apache committers and open source maintainers for non-Apache projects – while providing (selling) technology that enhances the open source products. We also plan to convert some of our core technology to open source projects over time.
What’s your view on the Oracle Google Java legal matter with regards to open source search?
The embedded Java situation is unique and I don’t think it applies to open source search technology. We’re not completely surprised, however, that Oracle would have a different opinion of how to manage an open source portfolio than Sun did. For the community at-large this is probably not a good thing.
What are the primary benefits of using open source search?
I’ll tell you what we hear from customers and users: the primary benefits are to avoid vendor lock-in and flexibility. There has been many changes in the commercial vendor landscape over the fifteen years we’ve been in this business, and customers feel like they’ve been hurt by changes in ownership and whole products and companies disappearing. Search, as we said earlier, is a core component that directly affects user experience, so customizing and tuning performance to their application is key. Customers want all of the other usual things as well: good price, high performance, support, etc.
When someone asks you why you don’t use a commercial search solution, what do you tell them?
We do partner with commercial search vendors as well, so we like to present the benefits of each approach and let the customer decide.
What about integration? That’s a killer for many vendors in my experience.
Our exposure to integration is on the “back end” of Lucene and Solr. Our technology plugs in to provide linguistic capabilities. Since we deliver a reliable connector between our technology and the search engine this hasn’t been much of a problem.
How does open source search fit into Basis’ product/service offerings?
Our product, Rosette, is a text analysis toolkit that plugs into search tools like Solr (or the Lucene index engine) to help make search work well in many languages. Rosette prepares tokens for the search index by segmenting the text (which is not easy in some languages, like Chinese and Japanese), using linguistic rules to normalize the terms to enhance recall, and also provide enhanced search and navigation capabilities like entity extraction and fuzzy name matching.
How do people reach you?
Our Web site, at www.basistech.com, contains details on our various products and services, or people can write to info@basistech.com or call +1-617-386-2090.
Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2010
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