MongoDB On The Road - Seattle CodeCamp

Ken W. Alger
September 20, 2018 | Updated: November 22, 2022
#Events

Seattle CodeCamp was held in the Pigott Building on the beautiful Seattle University campus. With the scenic Puget Sound just a few blocks to the west down Madison St and Lake Washington to the east down Cherry St, Seattle CodeCamp was situated in a magnificent venue.

This year, on Saturday, September 15, 2018, 450 developers attended the event. The sponsorship hall had representatives from a few of the conference sponsors including GitHub, Flatiron School, and the College of Science and Engineering from Seattle University. There were plenty of stickers and sponsor information up for grabs along with some great representatives from the companies to talk with.

Seattle Code Camp Swag

The conference sessions included over 65 sessions. One of the things I really enjoy about the CodeCamp events I’ve attended is the wide variety of speakers and session topics available. Everything from front-end to back-end topics is open game and available to learn.

Interested in IoT topics? There were sessions on those. Microservices, yup, Vidya Vrat Agarwal from T-Mobile gave a talk on the what, why, and how of those. Interested in the JAQ (Java + Angular + database) Stack? Adobe’s Suren Konathala gave an amazing talk on that. My former Treehouse colleague, James Churchill, gave a talk comparing JavaScript Frameworks.

And that’s just a small sample of the topics covered at this year’s Seattle Codecamp. I presented a talk on MongoDB & Node.js to a room of about 25 people. I brought with me a supply of MongoDB socks to give session attendees some swag which went over well. A large percentage of people in the room were unfamiliar with MongoDB in general and the MEAN/MERN stack specifically.

MongoDB Swag Socks

As a result, I tailored my talk to discuss the technologies themselves before showing how building an API is done with Node.js, Express.js, and MongoDB. I built an API that served up restaurants indexed by location. After building a functioning API I showed some of the features of MongoDB Compass to explore the data, perform CRUD operations, and leverage the geo-spatial data that was being stored inside MongoDB.

There were several MongoDB specific questions brought up during the session about some of the differences between the way legacy, relational databases store information and how a next generation database, such as MongoDB handles similar schema design and queries. It was a great discussion and provided a great opportunity to educate developers on the flexibility of MongoDB’s document model and the increase in development speed. You can find the project code on GitHub along with the talk slides here.

MongoDB is the easiest and fastest way to work with data. Download MongoDB Compass today and start making smarter decisions about document structure, querying, indexing, and more.

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Listing Your MongoDB Atlas Resources

If you want to use the MongoDB Atlas API to manage your clusters one of the first things you will discover is that resource IDs are the keys to the kingdom. In order to use the API you will need an API key and you will need to grant access to your program via the API whitelist.

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Retrieval Augmented Generation for Claim Processing: Combining MongoDB Atlas Vector Search and Large Language Models

Following up on our previous blog, AI, Vectors, and the Future of Claims Processing: Why Insurance Needs to Understand The Power of Vector Databases , we’ll pick up the conversation right where we left it. We discussed extensively how Atlas Vector Search can benefit the claim process in insurance and briefly covered Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs). MongoDB.local NYC Join us in person on May 2, 2024 for our keynote address, announcements, and technical sessions to help you build and deploy mission-critical applications at scale. Use Code Web50 for 50% off your ticket! Learn More One of the biggest challenges for claim adjusters is pulling and aggregating information from disparate systems and diverse data formats. PDFs of policy guidelines might be stored in a content-sharing platform, customer information locked in a legacy CRM, and claim-related pictures and voice reports in yet another tool. All of this data is not just fragmented across siloed sources and hard to find but also in formats that have been historically nearly impossible to index with traditional methods. Over the years, insurance companies have accumulated terabytes of unstructured data in their data stores but have failed to capitalize on the possibility of accessing and leveraging it to uncover business insights, deliver better customer experiences, and streamline operations. Some of our customers even admit they’re not fully aware of all the data in their archives. There’s a tremendous opportunity to leverage this unstructured data to benefit the insurer and its customers. Our image search post covered part of the solution to these challenges, opening the door to working more easily with unstructured data. RAG takes it a step further, integrating Atlas Vector Search and LLMs, thus allowing insurers to go beyond the limitations of baseline foundational models, making them context-aware by feeding them proprietary data. Figure 1 shows how the interaction works in practice: through a chat prompt, we can ask questions to the system, and the LLM returns answers to the user and shows what references it used to retrieve the information contained in the response. Great! We’ve got a nice UI, but how can we build an RAG application? Let’s open the hood and see what’s in it! Figure 1: UI of the claim adjuster RAG-powered chatbot Architecture and flow Before we start building our application, we need to ensure that our data is easily accessible and in one secure place. Operational Data Layers (ODLs) are the recommended pattern for wrangling data to create single views. This post walks the reader through the process of modernizing insurance data models with Relational Migrator, helping insurers migrate off legacy systems to create ODLs. Once the data is organized in our MongoDB collections and ready to be consumed, we can start architecting our solution. Building upon the schema developed in the image search post , we augment our documents by adding a few fields that will allow adjusters to ask more complex questions about the data and solve harder business challenges, such as resolving a claim in a fraction of the time with increased accuracy. Figure 2 shows the resulting document with two highlighted fields, “claimDescription” and its vector representation, “claimDescriptionEmbedding” . We can now create a Vector Search index on this array, a key step to facilitate retrieving the information fed to the LLM. Figure 2: document schema of the claim collection, the highlighted fields are used to retrieve the data that will be passed as context to the LLM Having prepared our data, building the RAG interaction is straightforward; refer to this GitHub repository for the implementation details. Here, we’ll just discuss the high-level architecture and the data flow, as shown in Figure 3 below: The user enters the prompt, a question in natural language. The prompt is vectorized and sent to Atlas Vector Search; similar documents are retrieved. The prompt and the retrieved documents are passed to the LLM as context. The LLM produces an answer to the user (in natural language), considering the context and the prompt. Figure 3: RAG architecture and interaction flow It is important to note how the semantics of the question are preserved throughout the different steps. The reference to “adverse weather” related accidents in the prompt is captured and passed to Atlas Vector Search, which surfaces claim documents whose claim description relates to similar concepts (e.g., rain) without needing to mention them explicitly. Finally, the LLM consumes the relevant documents to produce a context-aware question referencing rain, hail, and fire, as we’d expect based on the user's initial question. So what? To sum it all up, what’s the benefit of combining Atlas Vector Search and LLMs in a Claim Processing RAG application? Speed and accuracy: Having the data centrally organized and ready to be consumed by LLMs, adjusters can find all the necessary information in a fraction of the time. Flexibility: LLMs can answer a wide spectrum of questions, meaning applications require less upfront system design. There is no need to build custom APIs for each piece of information you’re trying to retrieve; just ask the LLM to do it for you. Natural interaction: Applications can be interrogated in plain English without programming skills or system training. Data accessibility: Insurers can finally leverage and explore unstructured data that was previously hard to access. Not just claim processing The same data model and architecture can serve additional personas and use cases within the organization: Customer Service: Operators can quickly pull customer data and answer complex questions without navigating different systems. For example, “Summarize this customer's past interactions,” “What coverages does this customer have?” or “What coverages can I recommend to this customer?” Customer self-service: Simplify your members’ experience by enabling them to ask questions themselves. For example, “My apartment is flooded. Am I covered?” or “How long do windshield repairs take on average?” Underwriting: Underwriters can quickly aggregate and summarize information, providing quotes in a fraction of the time. For example, “Summarize this customer claim history.” “I Am renewing a customer policy. What are the customer's current coverages? Pull everything related to the policy entity/customer. I need to get baseline info. Find relevant underwriting guidelines.” If you would like to discover more about Converged AI and Application Data Stores with MongoDB, take a look at the following resources: RAG for claim processing GitHub repository From Relational Databases to AI: An Insurance Data Modernization Journey Modernize your insurance data models with MongoDB and Relational Migrator

April 18, 2024