41. DISCOVERY, SEARCH, AND COMMUNICATION OF TEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE RESOURCES IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Scientific discovery underpins the advances the Nation needs to power our economy and develop energy independence. As science progresses only if knowledge is shared, the acceleration of the sharing of scientific knowledge speeds up scientific progress. In today’s world, this knowledge is embodied in digitized text formats (journal articles, gray literature research results, e-prints of research results, science project descriptions, and science program descriptions) hosted on geographically dispersed servers. Researchers would benefit greatly if they had ways to simultaneously search across these vast resources and find the specific knowledge they need. While technology has significantly accelerated the availability and quantity of scientific information on the Web, the tools and capabilities to find and search that information have not kept pace. This lag in search technology has created a chasm in the capability to globally search the Internet, especially with regard to distributed scientific textual databases.
Therefore, this topic seeks the discovery of knowledge resources and the creation of user-friendly metasearch tools. Metasearch tools to be built for researchers by organizations like the Office of Scientific and Technology Information (OSTI) require identification of textual knowledge databases that researcher’s need, together with appropriate configuration files to access them. Such metasearch tools must enable researchers to quickly search such databases and must present the search results in researcher-friendly ways. Such researcher-friendly ways to present search results include precision searching (e.g., relevance ranking), clustering, etc.
a. Discovering and Utilizing Knowledge Sources for Metasearch Knowledge Systems—To enable metasearch systems to be created and deployed, grant applications are sought to develop scalable concepts and technologies for discovering and utilizing authoritative, foreign and domestic, distributed collections of textual information in databases and web pages, with emphasis on the scientific disciplines of interest to DOE. Such textual information often contains tables, graphs, illustrations, photographs, etc. Grant applications are sought to develop the ability to search within the text for the titles, legends, headings, and data within these supplemental pieces of information and/or other subparts of documents. Examples of textual collections include; R&D results such as conference proceedings, gray literature, journal articles, and e-prints; R&D Project descriptions; R&D Program descriptions; and patents. OSTI's content can be made available to grantees as a source of information to drive and test the concepts and technologies used to discover and utilize authoritative information. Grant applications are sought for technologies to automatically configure or partially configure middleware to discover new sources, or otherwise make knowledge sources accessible via metasearch. If a grant application envisions the modification of an existing knowledge source, the application must document an appropriate agreement with the owner of such source.
Questions – contact Walter Warnick (walter.warnick@science.doe.gov)
b. Researcher-friendly Presentation of Metasearch Results—Grant applications are sought to develop scalable concepts and technologies for presenting metasearch results quickly in researcher-friendly ways. Such researcher friendly ways to present search results include precision searching (e.g., relevance ranking), clustering, and/or other ways proposed by the applicant. As scaling to many hundreds of database sources is envisioned, speed of response to the information researcher customer is an important metric.
Questions – contact Walter Warnick (walter.warnick@science.doe.gov)
References:
1. “DOE Science Accelerator: Advancing Science by Accelerating Science Access,” U.S. DOE Office of Science and Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), June 2006. (Available at: http://www.osti.gov/innovation/scienceaccelerator.pdf)
2. “Overview,” 2020 Science Website, Microsoft Research. (URL: http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/background_overview.htm)
3. “Science Conferences,” U.S. DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) Website. (URL: http://www.osti.gov/scienceconferences)
4. “Energy Science and Technology Virtual Library: Energyfiles, U.S. DOE OSTI Website. (URL: http://www.osti.gov/energyfiles/pathways.html)
5. “GrayLit Network,” U.S. DOE OSTI Website. (URL: http://www.osti.gov/graylit)
6. “Federal R&D Project Summaries,” U.S. DOE OSTI Website (URL: http://www.osti.gov/fedrnd)
7. “E-Print Network,” U.S. DOE OSTI Website. (URL: http://www.osti.gov/eprints)
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