»People should be able to find information about their local communities as easily as possible.«

Project CIFFIL Service

With their Spinque service, the team behind project CIFFIL aims to improve search quality for the council information search system of municipalities. The problem: Smaller municipalities can have skewed data distributions, as their document collections are relatively small.

“We hypothesize that distribution information from other municipalities can assist search systems for these smaller collections. Through CIFF files produced by us and the OWS.EU community, we want to improve term specificity scores for collections of smaller municipalties.” says Chris Kamphuis. This should eventually result in better search systems for council information, facilitating information access for council members and citizens of the EU.

The Spinque team that will be working on this project includes Dr. Roberto Cornacchia, Wouter Alink, M.Sc. and Chris Kamphuis, M.Sc, who bring ample experience developing IR tools for academia and industry.

“Our members are academically trained and now develop state-of-the-art IR solutions for clients (e.g. industry, governmental, cultural heritage) with various search needs. We build and operate a generic IR platform. One of our products is Raadzaam: A search engine for council information of municipalities. Raadzaam is used by several of the biggest municipalities of the Netherlands.” says Chris Kamphuis.

Alink and Cornacchia are both co-founders of Spinque and together have over three decades of experience in developing commercial search solutions. Kamphuis is author on both the common file index format (CIFF) and the proposed tokenizer for CIFF used in the OpenWebSearch.EU project.

https://spinque.com/