Buzzword conference in June

Like the Lucene conference I mentioned earlier, Berlin Buzzwords 2010 is a new conference that fills in the space left by the decision not to organize an ApacheCon in Europe this year. Going beyond the Apache scope, Berlin Buzzwords is a conference for all things related to scalability, storage and search. Some of the key projects in this space are Hadoop, CouchDB and Lucene.



I'll be there to make a case for hierarchical databases (including JCR and Jackrabbit) and to present Apache Tika project. The abstracts of my talks are:

The return of the hierarchical model

After its introduction the relational model quickly replaced the network and hierarchical models used by many early databases, but the hierarchical model has lived on in file systems, directory services, XML and many other domains. There are many cases where the features of the hierarchical model fit the needs of modern use cases and distributed deployments better than the relational model, so it's a good time to reconsider the idea of a general-purpose hierarchical database.

The first part of this presentation explores the features that differentiate hierarchical databases from relational databases and NoSQL alternatives like document databases and distributed key-value stores. Existing hierarchical database products like XML databases, LDAP servers and advanced filesystems are reviewed and compared.

The second part of the presentation introduces the Content Repositories for the Java Technology (JCR) standard as a modern take on standardizing generic hierarchical databases. We also look at Apache Jackrabbit, the open source JCR reference implementation, and how it implements the hierarchical model.

and:

Text and metadata extraction with Apache Tika

Apache Tika is a toolkit for extracting text and metadata from digital documents. It's the perfect companion to search engines and any other applications where it's useful to know more than just the name and size of a file. Powered by parser libraries like Apache POI and PDFBox, Tika offers a simple and unified way to access content in dozens of document formats.

This presentation introduces Apache Tika and shows how it's being used in projects like Apache Solr and Apache Jackrabbit. You will learn how to integrate Tika with your application and how to configure and extend Tika to best suit your needs. The presentation also summarizes the key characteristics of the more widely used file formats and metadata standards, and shows how Tika can help deal with that complexity.

I hear there are still some early bird tickets available. See you in Berlin!