Semantic Search – A New Foundation for Our Tools?

The goal of all tools is to make the lives of developers easier in one way or another. The Scala ecosystem moved a long way to make its tools helpful but there are still many people who are not happy with using these tools – me included. Because of this I went on a journey to find out where the unhappiness comes from and how it can be resolved. I came to the conclusion that we need to put our tools into a new coat if we want to address major limitations that make users unhappy. While my journey is still not finished, I found at least a new coat, which appeared to me in shape of a semantic search engine.

This talk aims to explain what I understand by great UX that results in happy users and why this is so hard to achieve. Furthermore I propose a concept of a tool that can provide great UX – the so called semantic search engine. Once the concept is settled we can continue to look into concrete technical details that not only allow us to understand how a semantic search engine can give us answers to questions that no other tool can answer but also how these answers can be used to enrich the functionality of existing tools. The talk is concluded with a vision that depicts a world where we can explore and visualize our data in ways that we can’t yet imagine.