The Information Retrieval Facility Project

Francisco de Sousa Webber (Matrixware)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2006-09-14
TIME: 15:00:00 - 16:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

ABSTRACT:
Matrixware is a company of 30 people located in Vienna/Austria. Matrixware maintains a large consolidated database of worldwide patent documentation (~20 TB), and provides its customers with text mining tools and professional services.

Matrixware is the initiator of the Information Retrieval Facility (IRF) project. The IRF is an independent research facility for large scale IR experiments guided by a scientific research council.

The IRF is built around a Supercomputing Cluster that is directly connected to a high performance database containing up to 50 million original patent documents. Due to its nature, the high quality and the large number of the text documents, the facility offers a perfect playground for large scale Information Retrieval experiments. The infrastructure works very efficiently for all sorts of semantic, language modelling and text manipulating algorithms. By integrating "Configurable Computing" hardware into the cluster the available processing power will be substantially extended. This facilitates an experimental approach to even the most consuming algorithms applied to this large dataset.

All research results and methods are open for examination by the scientific community. Matrixware hopes that the direct access to an adequate infrastructure and the openly available scientific documentation will bring a substantial boost to the academic Information Engineering community.

BIO:
Francisco Webber studied medicine at the Medical University of Vienna, where he specialized in genetics and serology research. In 1988 he combined his interest in computational science with his medical studies by developing a robot for blood group and HLA analysis. From 1985 to 1989 he worked as a free lance software developer (at IBM, EBC International), and continued to design, develop and deploy new technologies for medical environments (Austrian Kidney Transplantation Database for the Austrian Transplantation Centre in 1990, Austrian Dialysis Register Database within the EDTA framework in 1995, Patient Documentation System for the University Clinic Vienna from 19931999).

Francisco has published numerous scientific papers, carried out pilot studies and contributed to a variety of projects in the fields of Medical Administration, Medical Research, Culture, Finance, Security and Government.

In 2005 Francisco Webber co-founded Matrixware Information Services, which focuses on the development of software solutions for intellectual property research.

www.matrixware.com