Science.world from Information Today

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Thanks to Paula for further information about Science.world.
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Get Ready for Science.world

by Paula J. Hane

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has signed an agreement with The
British Library to partner on the development of a global science gateway
that aims to make science information resources of many nations accessible
via a single Internet portal, to be called Science.world. The signing took
place in late January at The British Library, concurrent with the winter
meeting of The International Council for Scientific and Technical
Information (ICSTI; www.icsti.org). Raymond L. Orbach, under secretary for
science of the DOE, signed the agreement with Lynne Brindley, chief
executive of The British Library.

Recognizing the impact of international research efforts, Orbach stated:
"It is time to make the science offerings of all nations searchable in one
global gateway. Our goal is to speed up the sharing of knowledge on a
global scale - As a result, we believe that science itself will speed up."

Brindley said: "We are delighted to be embarking on what we expect to be a
very fruitful collaboration with the DOE to develop the Science.world
resource. The British Library has a long history of delivering online
information resources through international partnerships."

DOE'ss Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI; www.osti.gov)
will work with The British Library (www.bl.uk) and international
counterparts to develop a prototype of Science.world in 2007. I chatted
with OSTI director Walt Warnick about plans for the new gateway. He said
they are working closely with ICSTI to spread the word to potential
participants and would provide a status report at the summer meeting of
ICSTI in France.

The new portal will use the model of Science.gov, which has served as the
gateway to reliable information about science and technology from across
federal government organizations since its launch in December 2002. The
main advantage of Science.gov is that it lets users search for information
by subject, rather than by the agency sponsoring it. The same will be true
of Science.world.

Warnick said Science.world will provide a search of authoritative
databases of nations, rather than a search of international portals. The
planned resource would be available to scientists in all nations and to
anyone interested in science.

Objectives of the Science.world initiative are the following:

* Search dispersed, electronic collections in various science disciplines

* Provide direct, seamless, and free searching of open source collections
and portals

* Build upon existing and already-successful national models for searching

* Complement existing information collections and systems

* Raise the
visibility and usage of individual sources of quality science information

Since its launch, Science.gov has continuously improved its search
technology. In May 2004, Science.gov Version 2.0 introduced relevancy
ranking with its QuickRank technology (see the NewsBreak at
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=3D16445).

Science.gov 3.0 introduced MetaRank in 2005, which ranks results using
custom algorithms applied to metadata or to the title, abstract, keywords,
subject categories, etc.  Science.gov 3.0 currently incorporates both
QuickRank and MetaRank to return better search results.

In early 2007, Science.gov 4.0 will launch DeepRank, which will download
and index the full text of documents to perform relevancy ranking for
precision search. Grid computing will be integral, allowing distributed
computers to communicate simultaneously and collaboratively. Warnick said
these same ranking technologies will be used for Science.world.

Searches on Science.gov are powered by Distributed Explorit from Deep Web
Technologies (DWT; www.deepwebtech.com), a small business located in Los
Alamos, New Mexico. Abe Lederman, president of DWT, was present at the
signing. A pioneer in federated search technology, he was excited about
this initiative and said: "It's great to see this sophisticated search
technology take on an international collaborative dimension. Leveraging
the kinds of capabilities Deep Web Technologies designed into the U.S.
Government's Science.gov federated search portal, launched in 2002, can
help to provide a truly global resource for scientists and
science-attentive officials, media professionals, entrepreneurs and
citizens."

I wondered whether Science.world would be seen as complementary or
competitive to Elsevier's science-specific search engine, Scirus. Joris
van Rossum, head of Scirus, provided this comment:  "Scirus, the most
comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet, searches
more than 300 million science-specific Web pages. A proven and
well-established free search engine, Scirus searches across all science
information resources including institutional repositories, journal
sources, preprint servers, patents, author home pages, and other Web
sources. Users from all nations can access Scirus for free via a single,
easy-to-use interface. We welcome any effort to make scientific
information easily accessible on the Web, however, from our perspective,
Science.world will not provide users with any additional tools that Scirus
does not already offer.

But Warnick stressed the differences in the technologies underlying Scirus
and Science.gov. The 'crawl' technology of Scirus pinpoints scientific Web
sites and Open Archives Initiative sources for search and then indexes the
information. The deep Web searching in Science.gov does not rely upon a
stored index built in advance but operates in real time, replicating the
query and broadcasting it to multiple databases. He explained: "The deep
Web search engine immediately reaches out to relevant databases at various
sites, drilling down into these information centers all at once,
organizing the info and returning results in real time. So, not only are
you plumbing databases, you're getting the most current results. As to
content, the focus for the global science gateway will be on pinpointing
and federating top government-sponsored research inside databases, rather
than information gleaned from millions of Web pages."

Paula J. Hane is Information Today, Inc.'s news bureau chief and editor of
NewsBreaks. Her email address is phane@infotoday.com.

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