System Associates wins Award for Innovation
February 26th 2010
System Associates was declared the winner in the Award for Innovation at the 2010 Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce Awards.
The award was given for the innovation shown by System Associates in the development of their search engine technology, with particular reference to their recent search project for Parliament.
The customer (www.parliament.uk) wanted to improve the standard of search currently offered and to have a search facility that would give fast and easy access to UK citizens to the wealth of information hosted in Parliament's document and web management systems. Secondly to improve the service available internally to Members, Parliamentary staff and researchers for internal documents.
Approach
System Associates provided a solution that is capable of understanding the complex range and style of records that are hosted by the UK Parliament (several million at the last count). These records include current and historical Hansard documents, Parliamentary questions, minutes of meetings, Early Day Motions, Bills, general web records, hosted documents, videos of Select Committee and other meetings and debates, audio records, records of artefacts (works of art etc.), Member details, image collections and many more.
The project is for 3 years and involves continuous development and release of new features, many of which are not found on other parliamentary / legislative search systems in other countries. Within the course of the project, Parliament and System Associates intend to provide the best parliamentary search engine throughout the world.
Technology
System Associates' search solution uses currently available open source technologies and develop a number of enhancements that create a search engine that is competitive with other well-known global solutions. The solution uses Java technologies and will run on both Linux and Windows operating systems.