Search Architecture – What Is under the hood?
The Information Bridge makes searchable full-text and bibliographic citations of DOE research results. This research covers the areas of physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics of interest to DOE's mission.
Information Bridge is powered by traditional Web-based architecture. That is, a database and a set of full-text documents are made searchable by a series of dynamic Web pages with persistent URLs (Web addresses). The entirety of a report is indexed and associated with its corresponding bibliographic citation.
The information consumer may perform a search against the entire record, both bibliographic citations and their associated full text, from the Basic Search feature. In addition, the user may perform fine grain searches by specific bibliographic citation fields and/or full text via the Fielded Search feature.
The Information Bridge not only allows the information consumer to 'pull' data from the system, it also provides 'push' technology to alert the information patron when new content of interest is added. Alert technology allows the user to set up a profile describing their topics of interest. When new content is added to the Information Bridge all of the existing Alert profiles are checked. If new content matching the user's profile has been added, the user is alerted via email. The email also contains a link to the report of interest.
