State Decoded is a platform that aims to demystify state laws and codes by displaying state codes, court decisions, and legislative tracking services information online and to help make it all more understandable for the general public with easy search. And now the State Decoded Project is going open source with Apache Solr. Details of the announcement are relayed in Waldo Jaquith’s post, “The State Decoded, Now Solr-Powered.”

State Decoded is looking to offer searchable laws, recommendations of similar laws, and natural language processing. These features are possible through text analytics and determining how they relate – which is a design pattern already available with Solr. The concept is explained:

The Solr document indexing software can be thought of as a search engine, meant to be installed on a single website, although it’s really much more advanced than that. It’s the unchallenged champion of search engine software, its power and flexibility unrivaled. Solr is a natural for The State Decoded. Solr provides some features that would otherwise need to be built from scratch and provides a framework that will make some exciting analysis and collaboration possible.

The first Solor-based Version 0.6 of The State Decoded software will be available November 1. Projects like The State Decoded are exciting applications of powerful search and Big Data analytics. LucidWorks is a good example of an open source development platform built on Apache Lucene/Solr that simplifies building search applications with the added benefit of community innovation and support.

Philip West, September 27, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.