Chau M, Huang Z, Qin JL, Zhou YL, Chen HC "Building a scientific knowledge web portal: The NanoPort experience " Decision Support Systems 42(2): 1216-1238, November 2006

[Eugene Garfield]

E-mail Addresses: mchau at business.hku.hk, zanhuang at psu.edu, 
qin at u.arizona.edu, yilu at u.arizona.edu, hchen at eller.arizona.edu 

Title: Building a scientific knowledge web portal: The NanoPort experience 

Author(s): Chau M (Chau, Michael), Huang Z (Huang, Zan), Qin JL (Qin, 
Jialun), Zhou YL (Zhou, Yilu), Chen HC (Chen, Hsinchun) 

Source: DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS 42 (2): 1216-1238 NOV 2006 

Document Type: Article 
Language: English 
Cited References: 48      Times Cited: 0        

Abstract: There has been a tremendous growth in the amount of information 
and resources on the World Wide Web that are useful to researchers and 
practitioners in science domains. While the Web has made the communication 
and sharing of research ideas and results among scientists easier and 
faster than ever, its dynamic and unstructured nature also makes the 
scientists faced with such problems as information overload, vocabulary 
difference, and lack of analysis tools. To address these problems, it is 
highly desirable to have an integrated, "one-stop shopping" Web portal to 
support effective information searching and analysis as well as to enhance 
communication and collaboration among researchers in various scientific 
fields. In this paper, we review existing information retrieval techniques 
and related literature, and propose a framework for developing integrated 
Web portals that support information searching and analysis for scientific 
knowledge. Our framework incorporates collection building, meta-searching, 
keyword suggestion, and various content analysis techniques such as 
document summarization, document clustering, and topic map visualization. 
Patent analysis techniques such as citation analysis and content map 
analysis are also incorporated. To demonstrate the feasibility of our 
approach, we developed based on our architecture a knowledge portal, called 
NanoPort, in the field of nanoscale science and engineering. We report our 
experience and explore the various issues of relevance to developing a Web 
portal for scientific domains. The system was compared to other search 
systems in the field and several design issues were identified. An 
evaluation study was conducted and the results showed that subjects were 
more satisfied with the NanoPort system than with Scirus, a leading search 
engine for scientific articles. Through our prototype system, we 
demonstrated the feasibility of using such an integrated approach and the 
study brought insight into applying the proposed domain-independent 
architecture to different areas of science and engineering in the future. 
(c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 

Addresses: Chau M (reprint author), Univ Hong Kong, Sch Business, Fac 
Business & Econ, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Peoples R China

Univ Hong Kong, Sch Business, Fac Business & Econ, Hong Kong, Hong Kong 
Peoples R China

Penn State Univ, Smeal Coll Business, Dept Supply Chain & Informat Syst, 
University Pk, PA 16802 USA

Univ Arizona, Eller Coll Management, Dept Management Informat Syst, Tucson, 
AZ 85721 USA

E-mail Addresses: mchau at business.hku.hk, zanhuang at psu.edu, 
qin at u.arizona.edu, yilu at u.arizona.edu, hchen at eller.arizona.edu 

Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, PO BOX 211, 1000 AE AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS 
Subject Category: Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence; Computer 
Science, Information Systems; Operations Research & Management Science 
IDS Number: 107ZO 

ISSN: 0167-9236 

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