Recently I wrote about the benefit for scientists of sharing their scholarly work and the difficulties posed by the current system of scientific databases.  Today I learned about a new open source effort for scientists to share their work, WorldWideScience.org. (via Gray Area)

WorldWideScience is…’a global science gateway connecting you to national and international scientific databases. It hopes to ‘accelerate scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching of global science sources’…

A blog on the OSTI site provides some background: ‘The dilemma is that no single scientist can be expected to be aware of the hundreds of high-quality STI sources on the web. Moreover, even if a person were aware of all of these sources, he or she simply wouldn’t have the time to search them one-by-one to find the scientific knowledge that will help accelerate his or her own efforts…’

The answer proved to be the creation of federated searching and precision relevance ranking technology to provide a single gateway to a number of national science databases.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Neil Turok's Wish Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.