World's largest Science Portal opens

[David E. Wojick]

Below is an announcement I am sending around. For this group I am 
wondering whether WWS is at all useful for science metrics? It has a 
great variety of material so there are not the standard records to 
support calculation. But its variatey in some ways may make it a 
better sample of scientific activity than, say, journal articles.

In any case I hope you find our portal useful and will tell others about it.

David Wojick

World's largest Science Portal opens. New tool in town.

In a bid to revolutionize science, a new global Alliance has launched 
the world's largest science portal. Http://www.worldwidescience.org 
searches an estimated 200 million pages of free science and 
technology content, making one of the most comprehensive portals in 
the world and the largest government portal by far.

The WorldWideScience Alliance consists of major government and NGO 
science information centers around the world. The portal is a 
federation of over 30 major national and regional portals, including 
the USA, Canada, Britain, France, Japan, Korea, Germany, etc. One 
search searches all. The USA member is the Science.gov Alliance, 
which runs the world's second largest government portal at 
http://www.science.gov. The WWS portal has just been launched, after 
a year of beta testing, see:
http://www.science.gov/communications/scigovprwwsalliance.html

The WWS.org portal is the brainchild of Walter Warnick, director of 
DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information, which built and 
operates the portal. See:
http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/home/entry/world_wide_science_the_one

I am a consultant on the WWS project. Our goal is a "knowledge 
diffusion revolution." This means that knowledge from every community 
can easily be found by every other community. Until now that has not 
been possible. What will science look like when the OSTI diffusion 
revolution takes hold? Revolutions change the way science works and 
this one is no exception. One simple example is in the content of 
research proposals. Today a proposal is required to demonstrate a 
knowledge of related work on the same topic. But there are many 
closely related elements that are also pursued in distant 
communities, where they are studying very different topics. These 
elements include instrumentation, methods, mathematics and 
fundamental concepts.

For example, nuclear physicists have not been expected to know about 
what is going on in forest management. But a recent paper in a 
forestry journal presented a breakthrough in Monte Carlo analysis, 
which is widely used in nuclear physics. Normally it would take years 
or decades for this new knowledge to migrate from forestry to 
physics, but the OSTI diffusion revolution is eliminating the delay 
time.

OSTI is making it possible for researchers to know about these 
distant activities, which has the potential to revolutionize science. 
Distant knowledge should be expected as a matter of course.

For more on this see my article "Making the Web work for science":
http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/home/entry/making_the_web_work_for
Also my " The OSTI diffusion revolution, a problem solving perspective":
http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/home/entry/the_osti_diffusion_revolution_a

Just pick some keywords and do a search on WWS.org. You will find out 
which countries are doing what. Note however that what we call 
biofuel in the USA the French call bioenergy. National differences do 
exist so you may have to poke around.

Happy to answer your questions,

David
-- 

"David E. Wojick, PhD" <WojickD at osti.gov>
Senior Consultant for Innovation
Office of Scientific and Technical Information
US Department of Energy
http://www.osti.gov/innovation/
391 Flickertail Lane, Star Tannery, VA 22654 USA
540-858-3136

http://www.bydesign.com/powervision/resume.html provides my bio and 
past client list.
http://www.bydesign.com/powervision/Mathematics_Philosophy_Science/ 
presents some of my own research on information structure and 
dynamics.
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