Mark Logic User Conference 2009

I'm at the Mark Logic 2009 User Conference in San Francisco.  For those not familar with the company, Mark Logic provides a software platform that combines an XML database, search engine, and application server.  It is a powerful, and exteremly fast, platform for building content rich applications that combine  structured and unstructured data into a single user experience.

The first day started with "The Wisdom of Crowds" author James Surowiecki speaking on how collaboration that follows certain practices can consistently generate results "better than the smartest person in the room."  He also described some interesting software applications that various companies have used to improve results using these techniques.

Wrapping up the day was discussion on the Google Book Project and the Copyright Settlement between MarkLogic CEO Dave Kellogg and Dan Clancy who leads the Google Book Search Project.  The discussion was actually too brief for me, Dan hinted at some data they have showing how Book Search keeps active titles selling at higher levels than is typical.  How making data searchable generates better book sales or other revenue would be an outstanding stand alone session.

Mark Logic also showed off some new features of the upcoming 4.1 release and discussed cloud computing and social networking.  They tied those 3 topics nicely together with a demonstration application that mines Twitter data called Tweet Explorer.  Tweet Explorer is running in the Amazon EC3 cloud system.  You can follow the conference using Tweet Explorer here:  http://tweetexplorer.marklogic.com/search?q=mluc09%20sort:time  They built that app in about 5 hours using some of the version 4.1 tools – quite impressive.

If you want more follow the conference blog:  http://marklogic-userconference.tumblr.com.