WorldWideScience

Last updated
WorldWideScience.org
World-wide-science-homepage-logo.png
Screenshot from the Homepage of WorldWideScience.org
Producer(U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information)
LanguagesMultilingual
Access
CostPartial free (login required for some activities)
Coverage
DisciplinesMulti-discipline
Geospatial coverageWorldwide
Links
Website worldwidescience.org

WorldWideScience.org is a global science search engine (Academic databases and search engines) designed to accelerate scientific discovery and progress by accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge. Through a multilateral partnership, WorldWideScience.org enables anyone with internet access to launch a single-query search of national scientific databases and portals in more than 70 countries, covering all of the world's inhabited continents and over three-quarters of the world's population. From a user's perspective, WorldWideScience.org makes the databases act as if they were a unified whole.

Contents

WorldWideScience.org implements federated searching to provide its coverage of global science and research results. Federated searching technology allows the information patron to search multiple data sources with a single query in real time. It provides simultaneous access to "deep web" scientific databases, which are typically not searchable by commercial search engines.

In June 2010, WorldWideScience.org implemented multilingual translations capabilities. Using Microsoft's Bing Translator, Multilingual WorldWideScience.org offers the user the ability to search across databases in ten languages and then have the results translated into their preferred language. "One to many" and "many to one" machine translations can be performed for Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Features and abilities

WorldWideScience.org provides science search through a variety of features and abilities, including:

History

The concept of a global gateway to national science information sources was first described by Dr. Walter Warnick at the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) annual meeting in Washington, DC, in 2006. The concept was formalized in January 2007 when the British Library and the United States Department of Energy signed a Statement of Intent to partner in the development of a global science gateway. Later officially named "WorldWideScience.org", the gateway was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information. The system was unveiled to ICSTI members and the public at the June 2007 ICSTI meeting in Nancy, France.

Since its release in June 2007, WorldWideScience.org has enjoyed tremendous growth in both the number of data sources searched, along with the number of countries participating as information providers. The default search of WorldWideScience.org includes a search of the US contribution, Science.gov, which tends to return scholarly information as opposed to lay information. A transition from bilateral management to a multilateral governance structure, called the WorldWideScience Alliance, occurred in 2008. A formal launch of the Alliance took place at the June 2008 ICSTI meeting in Seoul, Korea. In June 2010, the multilingual translations feature was launched at the ICSTI meeting in Helsinki, Finland. Multimedia searching capabilities were added in 2011, allowing the user to search speech-indexed scientific multimedia made available through the ScienceCinema site. A mobile version of WorldWideScience.org was also released in 2011.

Membership

The WorldWideScience Alliance has an international membership, including CISTI (Canada), ISTIC (China), VTT (Finland), INIST (France), INASP, International Nuclear Information System (INIS), TIB (Germany), JST (Japan), KISTI (Korea), Health Service Executive (HSE) (Ireland), SciELO (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Venezuela), CSIR (South Africa), British Library, Science.gov (United States), African Journals OnLine, and ICSTI.

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Information science</span> Academic field concerned with collection and analysis of information

Information science is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. Practitioners within and outside the field study the application and the usage of knowledge in organizations in addition to the interaction between people, organizations, and any existing information systems with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding the information systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital object identifier</span> ISO standard unique string identifier for a digital object

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they also fit within the URI system. They are widely used to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications.

The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) was established by resolution 2.31 adopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It first met in Paris at UNESCO Headquarters from 19 to 27 October 1961. Initially, 40 States became members of the commission. The IOC assists governments to address their individual and collective ocean and coastal management needs, through the sharing of knowledge, information and technology as well as through the co-ordination of programs and building capacity in ocean and coastal research, observations and services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Research Council Canada National Science Library</span>

The National Science Library (NSL), formerly known as the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information or CISTI, began in 1917 as the library of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). NRC is the Government of Canada's premier research and technology organization (RTO), working with clients and partners to provide innovation support, strategic research, scientific and technical services. The library took on the role of national science library unofficially in 1957 and became the official National Science Library in 1966.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chemical Abstracts Service</span> Division of the American Chemical Society

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is a division of the American Chemical Society. It is a source of chemical information and is located in Columbus, Ohio, United States.

A federated identity in information technology is the means of linking a person's electronic identity and attributes, stored across multiple distinct identity management systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Office of Scientific and Technical Information</span> Component of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy

The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is a component of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The Energy Policy Act PL 109–58, Section 982, called out the responsibility of OSTI: "The Secretary, through the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, shall maintain with the Department publicly available collections of scientific and technical information resulting from research, development, demonstration, and commercial applications activities supported by the Department."

Federated search retrieves information from a variety of sources via a search application built on top of one or more search engines. A user makes a single query request which is distributed to the search engines, databases or other query engines participating in the federation. The federated search then aggregates the results that are received from the search engines for presentation to the user. Federated search can be used to integrate disparate information resources within a single large organization ("enterprise") or for the entire web.

Slightly over half of the homepages of the most visited websites on the World Wide Web are in English, with varying amounts of information available in many other languages. Other top languages are Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Persian, French, German and Japanese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.

A concept search is an automated information retrieval method that is used to search electronically stored unstructured text for information that is conceptually similar to the information provided in a search query. In other words, the ideas expressed in the information retrieved in response to a concept search query are relevant to the ideas contained in the text of the query.

Scitopia.org is a free federated, vertical search portal that enables users to explore the collective content of 21 science and technology societies – the research most cited in scholarly work and patents – from a single search box on the open web. It aggregates the entire electronic libraries of its founders – societies in major science and technology disciplines. More than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content, spanning hundreds of years of scientific and technological discovery, and conference proceedings, are searched through this dedicated gateway.

Science.gov is a web portal and specialized search engine. Using federated search technology, Science.gov serves as a gateway to United States government scientific and technical information and research. Currently in its fifth generation, Science.gov provides a search of over 60 databases from 14 federal science agencies and 200 million pages of science information with just one query, and is a gateway to 2,200+ scientific websites.

AGRIS is a global public domain database with more than 12 million structured bibliographical records on agricultural science and technology. It became operational in 1975 and the database was maintained by Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development, and its content is provided by more than 150 participating institutions from 65 countries. The AGRIS Search system, allows scientists, researchers and students to perform sophisticated searches using keywords from the AGROVOC thesaurus, specific journal titles or names of countries, institutions, and authors.

The OpenSIGLE repository provides open access to the bibliographic records of the former SIGLE database. The creation of the OpenSIGLE archive was decided by some major European STI centres, members of the former European network EAGLE for the collection and dissemination of grey literature. OpenSIGLE was developed by the French INIST-CNRS, with assistance from the German FIZ Karlsruhe and the Dutch Grey Literature Network Service (GreyNet). OpenSIGLE is hosted on an INIST-CNRS server at Nancy. Part of the open Access movement, OpenSIGLE is referenced by the international Directory of Open Access Repositories.

Science Accelerator was a web-based gateway to science information including research results from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The information was provided as a free public service by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), within the Office of Science. It used federated search technology to search DOE-generated and DOE-related science information databases and collections. Federated search technology allowed the user to search multiple data sources with a single query in real time. It provided simultaneous access to "deep web" scientific databases, which were typically not searchable by commercial search engines.

The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) aims to promote cooperation among all those engaged in the scientific communication process by engaging national scientific unions and their respective scientific communities. It is a broad-based, international, not-for-profit membership organization based in Paris, France.

PATENTSCOPE is a global patent database and search system developed and maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization. It provides free and open access to a vast collection of international patent documents, including patent applications, granted patents, and related technical information.

References