Innovation

Exploiting the Use of Social Networking to Facilitate Collaboration in the Scientific Community

One of the objectives of the grant is to create a system for scientific collaboration to be used across the Department of Energy research community.

Real-Time, Full-Text Source Provisioning in the Digital Library

IIa researched and developed a prototype tool for real-time, electronic full-text source queries. This prototype system allowed users of federated search systems to have direct access to the publisher's copy of the electronic full text or, at a minimum, provide a direct link to the publisher's website.

Development of an Automated Tool for Locating, Harvesting and Storing Experimental Scientific and Technical Data

The collection and reporting of the results of scientific and technical (S&T) experiments, observations, and calculations have changed dramatically in the last 25 years. Previously the vast majority of S&T data were collected by hand or by small isolated computers and data recorders and reported in printed papers and reports, or hidden in lab notebooks. Today virtually all data are collected digitally and deposited into e-logs, e-notebooks, and computer files. The data are not only included in summary form in papers and reports, both printed and digital, but also more completely deposited in discipline-based repositories, institutional data collections, files associated with publications, and Web-based archives maintained by individual scientists and groups. The volume of data generated both in terms of numbers of datasets and in terms of moving to terabyte and petabyte scales, is usually far greater than what can be included in a paper. Data collections are often not even linked to a particular paper.

International Science Education Federated Search Engine

Due to multiple legislative acts by the present and recent administrations, there is a high level of interest in strengthening educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) from elementary through graduate school. While there is a large amount of domestic and international resources that are relevant to these subjects, there is currently no single source for accessing this information in a systematic manner. This project addressed the problem by increasing the access and availability of the relatively untapped sources of educational information being freely provided by other countries. In addition to strengthening education, this project directly supported the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) efforts by expanding functionality currently being developed for ScienceEducation.gov.

Mobile Devices Applications in the Digital Library

Government digital libraries serve as the primary vehicle to make the results of the government’s extensive research and development effort available to other researchers and to the public. These results are normally in the form of technical reports or journal articles, but there are also many other services provided by today’s digital libraries that may lend themselves to mobile devices. IIa proposed to research and develop prototype tools and services for expanding the digital library and its features to mobile applications, which will allow users of mobile devices to have direct access to the digital library services, including access to bibliographic metadata, electronic full text, RSS feeds, content updates, and related news and information. Our research will examine the practicality of providing various digital library services on mobile devices as well as explore the leveraging of existing mobile applications and services including possible Web 2.0 features. The research community will then be able to find information and stay connected to digital library service using their web-enabled mobile devices.

Development of an Automated Tool for Locating, Harvesting, and Storing Experimental Scientific and Technical Data

Today, scientific and technical (S&T) data are being generated at ever-increasing rates. At the same time, finding these data is becoming more difficult, as they are now often being deposited directly onto the Web without being linked to a specific publication. Even when a potential data source is located, present day search engines are not able to decode the content of the data source or to determine whether the data therein is useful for a given application. Users are then faced with going through hundreds, thousands, or many more potential data sources to find the few sources with data directly pertinent to their specific application. This project will develop an automated tool that will locate, transform, and place desired and relevant S&T data and metadata into a user-specified or community-of-interest-specified repository for further use.

Scientific Communication in the Digital Library Environment

There is a need for DOE scientists conducting similar research to be able to identify each other and to quickly collaborate on ideas. This research explores the concept of using Web 2.0 or social networking technologies in an electronic scientific library environment to facilitate these activities.

Contextual Spelling Suggestions Based on Specialized Vocabulary and Statistical Information of Historical System Usage

IIa's Contextual Spellchecker is comprised of a two phase algorithm. In the first phase every term is spell checked against the dictionary of valid terms using an industry standard "edit distance" algorithm. This dictionary of valid terms can be comprised of multiple source term lists. For example, in the implementation of our Contextual Spellchecker at DOE OSTI the dictionary of valid terms is comprised of list of common English terms, a list of Author names, and two distinct lists of science related terms. Additionally, this implementation of our Contextual Spellchecker supports the addition of user-defined terms to the dictionary of valid terms. This example evidences the flexibility we have in creating our dictionary of valid terms.

Use of Domain/IP Resolver in Lieu of Traditional Username/Password Authentication

The problem addressed was the secure automation of access to data DOE provides to the International Community. DOE currently operates an International Databases for 16 countries. Current access is controlled by checking the IP address and/or username/password of registered users. Some countries wanted to permit any citizen in their country to access the data, while other countries wanted to restrict access to a set of specific registered citizens. This problem also existed for several other Federal agencies as well as commercial concerns.

Weather/Climate Variability Impact on Energy, Water, and Food Resources and Implications for Regional Stability

Military planners, humanitarian organizations, and international investors face an increasing level of uncertainty regarding geopolitical areas considered critical to their respective interests. Aside from the normal factors impacting geopolitical instability the nature and pace of climate changes being observed today and the consequences projected by the consensus scientific opinion are grave and pose equally grave implications for our national security. IIa and its partner, the University of Tennessee, believe that there is currently a sufficient body of high quality, reliable information in the areas of climate change, cultural/social science, political science and world instability indicators upon which high quality predictions of regional instability can be based. We propose to integrate existing and emerging data mining and knowledge discovery techniques to achieve a leap-ahead solution to this challenge. When developed, this methodology will yield predictions about regional instability that will be of great value to military planners, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and business investors.

Web Metrics Analysis for Digital Libraries Based on Scientific and Technical Information

IIa proposed this project to research and develop a prototype web metrics analysis system for the scientific and technical information (STI) digital library environment. This prototype system provided mechanisms for analyzing and reporting web traffic patterns, electronic full-text downloads, and user queries. This functionality encompassed analysis of and reporting on the entire digital library environment, specific information dissemination products in the digital library, and detail-level reporting based on subject category or other classification means inside of the dissemination products.

Automated Data Cleansing in Data Harvesting and Data Migration

In the explosion of digitized information that is available through corporate databases, data stores and online search systems, a persistent problem for the knowledge worker is the management of the sheer volume of information identified. This information comes in the form of unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. One of the key issues that exacerbate this information overload is the production of duplicate or near-duplicate information. In addition, the near duplicate items frequently have different origins, creating a situation in which each item may have unique information of value but the differences are not significant enough to justify maintaining the items as separate entities. This project focused on the identification and removal of duplicate and near-duplicate items in the context of a system that allowed unique information in a set of near-duplicate items to be consolidated into a single, comprehensive item.

Deep Indexing of Complex Scientific and Technical Information Documents

As more information becomes digital, documents are changing. They are now becoming more complex with embedded links and links to external resources. These “new” documents are referred to as “information objects”, which is any information bearing container. In order to make these examples of complexity findable within a search strategy is the concept of “deep indexing”. IIa proposed this project to research and develop a methodology that will allow deep indexing of the results of DOE research and development projects. This methodology will allow the indexing of these complete documents in a manner that will permit users to search for and access the information presented in the complex objects. The research community will be able to find information in complex objects immediately, rather than manually search through volumes of information hoping to find the desired results.

Utility_Top

Services

IIa News

Contact

Utility_Bottom

Error