OSTIblogs Keyword: [doe]

Unique and interesting insights into U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Research and Development (R&D) accomplishments are available in a special collection that features research of DOE and its predecessor agencies, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

This special collection contains historically significant government documents that have been specially selected and digitized to make them accessible via the Web. Landmark documents such as The Eightfold Way: A Theory of Strong Interaction Symmetry and The First Weighing of Plutonium are among approximately 300 specially-selected documents included in the database. Additionally, documents are aggregated with related aspects of the collection into more than sixty (60) Feature Topic pages with diverse topics such as Video Games -- Did They Begin at Brookhaven? and Human Genome Research: Decoding DNA.

WorldWideScience provides a one-stop search engine to mine global scientific databases in the deep web

The internet has revolutionized society by changing the way people communicate, find information, and enjoy entertainment. But a standard internet search misses at least 90 percent of the information available. 

The internet is separated into two unequal pools of information. The surface web contains pages of information that are utilized by popular search engines. The second pool of information is locked away in the deep web, which consists of countless databases world wide.

Did you know that science information is available via web "mashups"? Web "mashups" combine multiple products/services into a single application for the purpose of consolidating information with an easy-to-use interface.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) uses “mashups” to return search results from Science Accelerator, Science.gov, and WorldWideScience.org. These "mashups" include external sources of information, in these cases from Wikipedia and EurekAlert!, that are provided as a service to the user for help with additional background information or with the ability to further study their topic.

OSTI is driven! We are fully committed to providing scientists and researchers with the social networking tools and services that can make it easier for them to more rapidly advance their scientific research. We have a number of exciting ongoing initiatives in support of accelerating the evolution of science. Here are ten that come to mind:

On October 14, OSTI announced that the People's Republic of China had joined the WorldWideScience Alliance. The press release making the announcement described, and hinted at, the importance of China's contribution:

China, a major producer of journals and conference proceedings, is offering searches of key Chinese English-language scientific literature through WorldWideScience.org. The Chinese resource enables searching of over 6,000 journals.

Our team is excited to announce that you can now join in or start discussions on important DOE research and development in the Information Bridge collection.

Our new social networking feature, Document Discussion, has been added to the Information Bridge to provide a forum for moderated, substantive commentary on DOE research and development.

Our OSTI team recently completed digitizing and uploading to the Information Bridge database about 10,000 documents issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (from 1991 to 1994). This means that citizens can now search this database and rapidly download these documents in full text – all for free.

by Walt Warnick and Sol Lederman

This is the final article in a series about the limitations of the crawl and index approach to searching scientific content and the advantages of federated search. Part 1 identified a number of issues with Google and the other crawlers, and showed why researchers and the science attentive citizenry don't rely on "Googleable" content to meet their needs for quality scientific and technical information. Part 2 explained how federated search, by providing access to "non-Googleable" content, overcomes the Google limitations. This article highlights three important applications, developed and maintained by OSTI, that demonstrate how federated search is going beyond crawling to advance science.

by Walt Warnick and Sol Lederman

This is the second in a three part series of articles about the deficiencies of web crawling and indexing, the superiority of federated search to the serious researcher, and the value of OSTI federated search applications in advancing science. Part 1 identified a number of serious limitations of Google and the other crawlers. This article shows how federated search overcomes these limitations. The final article in the series highlights a number of federated search applications and databases that OSTI makes available to the public.

by Walt Warnick and Sol Lederman

The web is growing.

For providing searchable access to the content that matters the most to scientists and researchers, Google and the other web crawlers can't keep up. Instead, growing numbers of scientists, researchers, and science attentive citizens turn to OSTI's federated search applications for high quality research material that Google can't find. And, given fundamental limitations on how web crawlers find content, those conducting research will derive even more benefit from OSTI's innovation and investment in federated search in the coming years.

In Part 1 of this series I provided an overview of the technology that drives the E-print Network. In this article I will provide some detail about how the harvested collection, the "E-prints on Web Sites" component of the E-print Network, is constructed. In Part 3, I will discuss the technology of the portion of the E-print Network that relies on federated search of databases.

 Part of OSTI's R&D aims at understanding how scientists use information. This goal was originally articulated by OSTI's Thurman Whitson, who has since retired. To that end we have begun to look at the different kinds of information provided by the different Web-based science resources. Different kinds of information imply different uses. It is not that one resource is better than another overall, it is that they are very different and support different uses.

The E-print Network is one of OSTI's most popular and powerful research offerings yet few of its users know about the advanced technology that drives it and makes it simple to use. Professional researchers in basic and applied science are able to access over 5 million e-prints gathered from nearly 28,000 world-wide databases and web-sites. Numerous OSTI innovations ensure that the E-print Network's documents are of extremely high quality, are highly relevant to researchers, and are easy and quick to find. This is the first in a series of articles about the technology behind this very important component of the Science Accelerator. This article serves as an overview; subsequent articles will provide more technical information.

OSTI provides searchable access to vast collections of DOE research results, project descriptions, and accomplishments. Making R&D findings available and usable is central to OSTI's mission:

The mission of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to Department of Energy (DOE) researchers and the American people.