WorldWideScience.org (WWS) is a global science gateway developed by the US Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in partnership with federated search vendor Deep Web Technologies. WWS provides a simultaneous live search of 69 databases from government and government-sanctioned organizations from 66 participating nations. The WWS portal plays a leading role in bringing together the world's scientists to accelerate the discoveries needed to solve the planet's most pressing problems. In this paper we present a brief history of the development of WWS and discuss how a new technology, multilingual federated search, greatly increases WWS' ability to facilitate the advancement of science.
In 1999 a directed query distributed search engine was integrated into a new Department of Energy Virtual Library of Energy Science and Technology. Millions of pages of government information across multiple agencies were made immediately searchable via one query, setting the stage for the development of a variety of interagency initiatives and applications.
In 1999 a directed query distributed search engine was integrated into a new Department of Energy Virtual Library of Energy Science and Technology. Millions of pages of government information across multiple agencies were made immediately searchable via one query, setting the stage for the development of a variety of interagency initiatives and applications.
The future of scientific research depends on sifting through more information, more quickly, and more effectively. For a researcher to expect to be able to search 1,000 databases simultaneously for critical information is not unreasonable. While parallel search is the domain of federated search, the current paradigm has severe limitations. The limitations, which include speed, relevance ranking, and selecting the appropriate sources, become painfully obvious when one attempts to search more than a few dozen sources simultaneously. A paradigm is needed for scalability to not only overcome the limitations but also help us assimilate important information. Scalability matters because, for the first time in history, we have access to diverse research from many of the world's nations and we are too overwhelmed to make sense of it all. Scalability also matters because the acceleration of the scientific discoveries we need to make to solve the world's pressing problems depends on the cross-fertilization of ideas that occurs when scientists from different disciplines contribute to, and draw from, a large number of information sources.
