Lucene has been around for a while now. Many bioinformatics centres have been experimenting with its use with biological data and databases. A pioneering development in this field is headed by Dr. Don Gilbert at Indiana University, called LuceGene, a part of the GMOD (Generic Software Components for Model Organisms Databases) initiative. Another example is the search engine in the UniProt web site which is also based on Lucene and adds features such as sorting large data sets, subqueries across data sets and group-by queries. Lucene is also used in QuALM a question answering system for Wikipedia.