OSIR 2012 - SIGIR 2012 Workshop on Open Source Information Retrieval

The open source IR community has been strong for many years. Early search engines (such as MG) continue to be used in larger open source projects (such as Greenstone). More recent open source search engines (such as Apache Lucene) are used to power the search facilities of some of the largest technology companies (such as IBM, AOL, and Apple). In the academic community, such search engines are routinely used to test ranking functions, compression algorithms, user interfaces, and so on. Open Source IR is now an essential component of research and commerce. This workshop is providing a venue for users and authors of open source IR tools to get together and discuss their joint future.
Research papers, position papers, posters on open source IR as well as demos of exciting packages are sought. Topics include, but are not limited to: Software Engineering; Hardware Engineering; Evaluation; Needs, Desires, and Demos; Protocols. Participants are encouraged to demonstrate and discuss their software during the demo session.
Of particular interest is how to work together to build OpenSearchLab, an open source, live and functioning, online web search engine for research purposes. We believe that the tools to build OpenSearchLab mostly exist and by working together we can build it and transform the future of research in IR.