Innovative Web Resources Can
Advance the DOE R&D Mission

Slide 1: Innovative Web Resources Can
Advance the DOE R&D Mission

ARPA-E
June 24, 2010

Walter L. Warnick, Ph.D.
Director
Office of Scientific & Technical Information
U. S. Department of Energy

 

Slide 2: OSTI Mission

To advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the public

"If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." – Isaac Newton 1676

Premise: Science advances only if knowledge is shared

Corollary: Accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge accelerates the advancement of science

 

Slide 3: To Accomplish Our Mission We Take Advantage of Technology

• We’re in an era of transformational technology
• We’ve been constantly challenged to adapt & adopt
• We’ve been early adopters
• We’ve found it helpful to advance web technologies in niche areas important to our mission

Slide 4: Focus of DOE STI Program

Ensuring global access to DOE research results; bringing the world’s research to DOE

• We maintain DOE STI for long-term use and make it freely & easily searchable online


• We ensure worldwide scientific knowledge and discoveries are accessible to DOE researchers, thus accelerating the advancement of science

 

Slide 5: Progression of STI Products

• DOE research community produces many types of scientific and technical information, each of which has its own unique characteristics and life cycle


• As a consequence, OSTI set out to create new web-based tools for each type of STI and make it efficiently accessible to users

Slide 6: Progression of STI Products

• Information Bridge – Information Bridge – First, R&D technical reports were made full-text searchable, freely available online. Now over 237,000 DOE technical documents fully searchable.


• E-Print Network – E-print Network – Created to address researchers’ self-published STI. Searches over 5.3 million e-print documents contained in more than 33 thousand separate websites and over 60 databases on energy research.


• R&D Project Summaries –DOE R&D Project Summaries – Provides summaries of ongoing or recently completed DOE research projects

Other tools were developed to uniquely address each type of STI and the manner in which they were published:

 

Slide 7: Single-Query Search

The Challenge: Researchers needed help sorting through the numerous products to get the most relevant results quickly

The Solution: To simplify searching of multiple resources, OSTI integrated key STI databases into a single-query search

Science Accelerator

• Results are integrated


• Results are displayed in relevance-ranked order

 

 

Slide 8: DOE STI Integrated With Other Federal Agency STI

• OSTI developed and operates Science.gov, a single-search portal of STI from 14 federal science agencies


• Science.gov represents 97 percent of the federal research and development budget

Science.gov is among 10 government websites "meeting and exceeding" the Obama Administration’s transparency goals, according to a special report by Government Computer News, released July 27, 2009.

 

 

Slide 9: Next, We Integrated Global R&D Results

U.S. research results (Science.gov) plus research results from 60+ countries are searchable via single-query global science portal

WorldWideScience.org
The Global Science Gateway

• Tremendous growth in search content: from 10 nations to 65 nations in 3 years

• > 400 million pages
• From well-known sources: e.g., PubMed, CERN, KoreaScience
• To more obscure sources: e.g., Bangladesh Journals Online

 

Slide 10: Launched: Multilingual WorldWideScience.org now breaks language barrier

Helsinki, June 11, 2010

• Translation of English content for non-English speakers and
• Translation of non-English content for English speakers

 

Slide 11: Here’s how it works …

1. A Chinese scientist submits a query in Chinese to Multilingual WorldWideScience.org.
2. MWWS.org uses Microsoft to translate the Chinese query into individual languages of source databases (English, French, Portuguese, Russian, etc.)
3. MWWS.org sends the translated queries to corresponding databases, which search their contents and return results in native languages to MWWS.org.
4. MWWS.org uses Microsoft to translate native language results into Chinese and presents results to the user in relevance-ranked order.

Conversely, an English-speaking user could have a query translated into languages of non-English databases and then get results back in English.

 

 

Slide 12: The "Accelerating" Power of WorldWideScience.org

Overcoming the researcher’s practical limitations:

1. Not knowing “what’s out there.” (examples: Korean medical journals, Australian Antarctic data, South African scientific research database)
2. Inadequate time to search scientific databases one by one. (examples: UK PubMed Central, Ginsparg’s arXiv.org)
3. Inability to sort compiled results by relevance.

By filling these gaps, WorldWideScience.org has accelerated access to scientific information.

Slide 13: Customized Services for DOE Programs

Using core knowledge and unique capabilities, OSTI also provides customized S&T information tools and services requested by individual DOE offices on a cost-recovery basis:

• Information science and subject-matter expertise


• Metadata and full-text management


• Subject-specific databases and web portals


• Specialized searching using federated searches, targeted crawls, and data harvesting

One example:

SC e-journals

Slide 14: DOE Open Government Plan.

The DOE plan includes a number of OSTI initiatives to enhance transparency of DOE R&D results.

Highlights

The Energy Department Open Government Plan Highlights
Transparency Programs
Participation Programs Collaboration Programs

Flagship Initiatives
The Energy Department Open Government Flagship Initiatives

 

Slide 15: OSTI Provides DOE "High Value" Data Sets

Five "high value" data sets initially identified by DOE include DOE R&D results that OSTI makes accessible, searchable, findable, and usable.

Information Bridge
DOepatents
DOE R&D Project Summaries
Conference Papers & Proceedings
Energy Citations Database

 

Slide 16: How Have We Accomplished So Much?

OSTI milestones have been achieved through:

• The most judicious use of scarce resources
• Leveraging collaborations, and
• Capitalizing on ground-breaking results coming from SBIR projects
  
• Relevancy ranking search results
• Domain recognition access
• Grade-level stratification of web documents

Slide 17: Innovative Web Technologies- Opportunities On the Horizon

More can and should be done with innovative web technologies to:

• Make video full-text searchable
• Enable mobile applications
• Create DOIs for numeric data sets

ARPA-E has opportunity to help advance these technologies