About
About The Site
The aim of this site is to cover some of the more relevant areas of information science and natural language processing for web developers working with PHP. The focus isn't on necessarily providing step by step how-to tutorials, but to look into the topics and difficulties in those areas, and to do so with the relevant examples illustrated using PHP. For me, writing the ideas into (hopefully) coherent posts clarifies my own understanding and appreciation of the work. Hopefully for most people, the site should spark some ideas on how best to work with the various search and text processing systems in use around the web.
About Me
My name is Ian Barber, and I work with PHP and a lot of dangerously smart people for Ibuildings in the UK. You can contact me by sending an email to Ian Barber (one word) at gmail.com.
Talks
In Search Of - Integrating Site Search
PHP UK 2010 - Slides.
Dutch PHP Conference 2010
What Are You Talking About? Document Classification In PHP
Dutch PHP Conference 2009 - Slides.
Sogeti Engineering World 2010 - Slides.
References
The two books I've primarily relied on for IR background are:
- Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval. Addison-Wesley. 1999.
- Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008.
The full text of the second is available on the book's website, and is a great, up-to-date introduction.
The two open source search engines I reference are Lucene and Xapian.
There are various blogs and other websites, some of which I've linked in the Links block over on the right!