March 15, 2007

A vision for speeding up science and technology developments

By Dr. Walter Warnick, DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information

As David Wojick explains in his article, "Mapping technology chaos," on page 36, power engineers are under the gun to innovate. The president and Congress are calling for dramatic new advances in power technology. They are even considering legislating progress in areas such as efficiency and emissions control.

 

Turning data into information

Power engineers know better than anyone that progress is incremental and never easy. There is no magic wand just waiting to be waved. The only way to meet ambitious technology goals is by combining myriad small advances quickly and efficiently. The problem is finding the research results and expertise needed to do that.

The U.S. Department of Energy spends billions of dollars a year on science and technology research related to power production. And the DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has a strategy—not just a desire—for accelerating progress in science and technology across the board. Technology advances only if science is shared, and OSTI wants to speed up that sharing. The cost of sharing knowledge is very small compared to the cost of creating it, so OSTI's strategy is economically efficient as well.

The amount of ongoing power generation-related research is already enormous, and many people are calling for funding a lot more. The higher the haystack of research gets, the harder it is to find a needle that may be useful. Making searches of the vast amount of available research more efficient is OSTI's objective.

Web accessibility is just the beginning of the solution, not the end. General search engines like Google do not access 90% or more of web-accessible science and technology content. The vast majority of research material is found only in document databases that web crawlers cannot reach, because each database has to be searched separately. Google is of no help here. Manually searching multiple research databases and integrating the results is simply too time-consuming to make sense.
 

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