OpenSearch at Berlin Buzzwords 2024

Wed, Jul 03, 2024 · Kris Freedain

Berlin Buzzwords 2024 was a fantastic gathering for the search community again this year. The OpenSearch Project was the platinum partner again, as we feel this conference continues to be a vital place for us to meet the community. We were thankful that three of our project partners, Eliatra, Alyrn.ai, and Adelean, came to join us this year and speak to the community.

The event started off with “Barcamp,” a kind of “un-conference” with a schedule decided that day. OpenSearch was able to share with the community multiple times during Barcamp. Michael Froh spoke about performance optimization in Lucene, Stavros Macrakis spoke about search relevance, and Hajer Bouafif led a conversation, including a live demo, about how to choose the right machine learning (ML) search type for your business.

Additionally, we presented two talks at this year’s conference.

Praveen Mohan Prasad and Hajer Bouafif presented Rediscover your keyword search: Expand, Enrich and Rewrite and explained why dense vector search is not the only way to improve your search relevance. They shared how to empower your existing sparse keyword search with semantic search capabilities by leveraging text expansion, metadata enrichment, and query rewriting techniques. Watch the full session:

slides available here notebook code demo application url

Mingshi Liu and Owais Kazi presented Elevating AI Applications with OpenSearch’s Flow Framework and RAG Tool, where they introduced OpenSearch’s Flow Framework and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Tool, which enables developers to create AI-augmented agents, queries, and ingestion flows, integrate ML models, and streamline app development through a no-code/low-code builder. Watch the full session:

slides available here

Our booth was well attended, and we noticed a few patterns: A lot of people either wanted to congratulate the presenters on how much they got out of the talks or had questions about their existing workflows and instances and stopped by to seek information or advice. This told us that OpenSearch is continuing to be adopted by the community as a platform of choice, and it gave us ideas regarding further content development. If you would like to help contribute that content, check out help wanted and new blog in the project-website repository. We also observed that the booth was packed during breaks but that the booth area really cleared out during sessions. This confirms what an incredible show Plain Schwarz puts on and that each presentation given at Berlin Buzzwords is truly appreciated by the community.

We’re already excited about next year’s Berlin Buzzwords.

Want to connect with the OpenSearch community in person? Our third annual OpenSearchCon North America is coming to San Francisco September 24–26, and we hope to see you there. We also recommend joining the conversation on the forum and public Slack instance. Interested in local user groups? Find out if there is an event near you on our Meetup page, read our charter and guidelines, or offer to give a talk in the #user-groups channel.