i-tao

Recent Projects

International Oil Company

The client is an independent oil and gas company focused on the exploration, production and acquisition of oil and gas reserves in the North Sea and United States.

With offices in Houston, Aberdeen and London, they needed a tool to help them quickly locate information from the vast amounts of documents generated by each project. Our simple search solution included a custom built indexing module that used Tika to pull the document metadata and content, and a custom search interface that was built on Solr's out of the box faceting capability.

The delta update of the index is done on an hourly basis ensuring new items and deletions are picked up. The indexer scans all the permitted network drives as well as the Sharepoint server.

National Truck and Trailer Hire Company

The client is one of the UK's largest truck and trailer rental specialists; with a fleet of over 20,000 vehicles.

Working in conjunction with Grant Thornton, we built a vehicle database that tracked the monthly activities of each vehicle, all the invoices and expenditure.

With about 200,000 new entries each month, Solr's faceting capability proved to be the perfect tool to help categorize and organize the data into a simple searchable format. The client can now have views by customer, by depot, by vehicle type, all drillable down to individual vehicles. Further analysis can be done with filtering by vehicle age and hire type.

Advertising Media Monitoring and Archive Company

The client is a leading global media intelligence company. With an international archive containing more than 7 million TV, cinema, radio, press, outdoor and Internet banner ads. Their customers can search by: date, country, category, brand, media and keyword. Instantly locating any ads from around the world and watch them immediately.

On recommendation by Grant Thornton, we looked at current performance issues facing the database backed searches. As well as helping them with recommendations to optimise the existing setup, we were engaged in a Solr proof of concept project.

In terms of performance, our proof of concept project demonstrated that Solr can match and exceed their current database driven searches, using less complex hardware and therefore much more scalable going forward. Furthermore, the faceting, spell checking, more like this suggestions and result scoring are functionalities which would be difficult to implement using traditional database technology.