Mastering Science Research at SLA

How do you remotely access the immense amount of existing scientific information, when only a fraction of it is available in an electronic format?  Abe Lederman (our President and CTO), has been pondering this question for some time, not only recognizing the natural barriers to transforming scientific advances into positive societal impacts, but developing the mechanism to accelerate the diffusion of knowledge amidst rapid growth rates of information and globalization of scientific sources.

At the Special Libraries Association (SLA) annual conference in Washington, DC last month, Abe unveiled his ideas regarding this challenge while presenting his contributed paper, “Science Research: Journey to 10,000 Sources.”  The challenges of “global discovery” on the Internet can be distilled to three important observations:

1. Scientific progress depends on the diffusion of knowledge.
2. Knowledge that may lead to breakthroughs frequently resides in distant scientific communities.
3. Innovation is needed to speed up the diffusion of knowledge.

Abe highlighted ScienceResearch.com (represented below) as an example of how to speed up the diffusion of knowledge.

ScienceResearch.com Homepage

Abe proposed that federated search technology is the next generation tool needed to search thousands, ultimately tens of thousands, of collections simultaneously, along with producing an integrated real-time results ranking.  While the current technology has limitations, a faster, more efficient and cost-competitive search will give information-centric government agencies and commercial enterprises measurable performance advantages.

As proof of Deep Web Technologies’ commitment to the vision of global discovery, ScienceResearch.com, a portal searching over 400 authoritative scientific and technical collections, launched on June 15, 2009 at SLA.  ScienceResearch.com conquers one of the largest challenges with federated search: scalability.  Using a divide-and-conquer approach, ScienceResearch.com is the most comprehensive science research portal available today, combining results from existing federated search portals such as WorldWideScience.org, Science.gov and Mednar.com to yield extraordinarily accurate, aggregated results.  With the possibility of a huge number of parallel searches and concurrent users, Deep Web Technologies deployed ScienceResearch.com at an Amazon Cloud Computing Data Center tackling the scalability issue with this on-demand design.

Visit ScienceResearch.com and let us know your thoughts.  Deep Web Technologies is also looking for moderators for each sci-tech category.  Moderators should be willing to volunteer a few hours a month on new collection research or category communication in exchange for promotion of their organization on the category homepage.  If you are interested in joining our effort by becoming moderator, or offering feedback through beta testing please let us know!

The contributed paper, “Journey to 10,000 Sources” can be viewed on the SLA website here, and Abe’s presentation is available here.