From Puppy to Maturity: Experiences in Developing Terrier

The Terrier information retrieval (IR) platform, maintained by the University of Glasgow, has been open sourced since 2004. Open source IR platforms are vital to the research community, as they provide state-of-the-art baselines and structures, thereby alleviating the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Moreover, the open source nature of Terrier is critical, since it enables researchers to build their own unique research on top of it rather than treating it as a black box. In this position paper, we describe our experiences in developing the Terrier platform for the community. Furthermore, we discuss the vision for Terrier over the next few years and provide a roadmap for the future.