Customer: The Science.gov Alliance

With over 50 million pages of science information, the Science.gov alliance is a collaborative effort of 12 federal agencies and 14 scientific and technical organizations spearheaded by OSTI (Office of Science and Technical Information) whose mission is to advance science and technology.

Problem: Isolated Scientific and Technical Information

Recognizing that outstanding government information was frequently missed by popular search engines, the Science.gov alliance was formed voluntarily in 2001 to address the need to unite isolated scientific and technical data.   Dr. Walter Warnick, Director of OSTI stated, “The first page of a database may be accessible by search engines such as Google, but Google can’t get beyond that surface.”  Due to the large volume of R&D material at the Department of Energy (plus 1,200 additional sites and databases), presenting users with a single interface to access deep web information was critical to promoting the government’s research data.  “Our primary customers are researchers, who need to be aware of what other agencies are doing in topics of their concern.” Mr. Warnick elaborated.

Solution:  Create Search to Access All Information from One Place

In early 2002, the Science.gov alliance selected Deep Web Technologies as the only company who had the knowledge and ability to federate their disparate information sources.  Because many of the sources were small, it made sense to index some of  them while searching others in real-time.  This hybrid  approach allowed a seamless, cost-effective search of all sources in parallel.

Geared toward a wide audience, from private business owners to academics, Science.gov launched their one-click search to technical reports, journal citations, databases and fact sheets in late 2002.   Deep Web Technologies’ state-of-the-art product provided superior distributed search and retrieval capabilities, replacing the fragmented search process users would normally use.  Dr. Warnick remarked, “No longer need a web patron know ahead of time which agency is doing what kind of research.”

Since the original implementation of Science.gov three additional releases have been made, further enhancing the search, the site and the user experience.  Science.gov offers a number of features to ensure that the most relevant results are delivered to the user.  Behind the scenes, Deep Web Technologies’ Explorit Research Accelerator orchestrates the search by continuing to retrieve relevant information from sources that are returning high-quality results and halting the search of sources that return poor-quality results.  As results are returned, a powerful relevance ranking technology is used to sort the data for the user. Because Science.gov only searches high-quality information sources, its output is accurate and authoritative.  On the front end, Science.gov offers user-friendly features such as alerts, Boolean logic, and an intuitive user interface. Dr. Warnick notes, “I am not aware of any gateway or portal, either in government or in the private sector that offers such precise searching and sophisticated relevance ranking of the deep web sources.”  Science.gov was such a success that in 2003 OSTI named the very first street honoring a multi-agency government internet portal: Science.gov way.

Links: Try Explorit on Science.gov