[Sigia-l] Re: Sigia-l Digest, Vol 2, Issue 22 (Out of office)

[ALBERT LUKBAN]

Thank you for your email.  I will be out of the office until the morning
of 11/22 and will not be able to regularly access my email account. 

If you need immediate assistance, please contact Michael Garvey at
703/984-5372.

Thanks!

Albert

>>> sigia-l 11/19/04 12:00 >>>

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Google Scholar (Tanya Rabourn)
   2. Re: Google Scholar (Karl Fast)


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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 10:25:20 -0500
From: Tanya Rabourn <tanya at pixelcharmer.com>
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Google Scholar
To: Donna Timara <tdonna at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <67F3CC07-3A3F-11D9-8FD3-000A27DD04FC at pixelcharmer.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed

On Nov 18, 2004, at 12:28 PM, Donna Timara wrote:
> What value does it add, looking at Google does not own any database of
> Scholarly content?
>
> I am comparing it with some of the already established ones - Factiva
> for business/financial, ACM for HCI, HBR etc... Is the search
> capability that big a deal?
>
> I am sure it is good for Open Access Journals, but then what's the
> difference with what was Google search before. I want to understand
> why this is making headlines today.
>

It's just the packaging of something that was actually worthy of some 
headlines (but not limited to google).  I'm sure you've heard about 
efforts to get at the "deep web" which include some of the resources 
you mention. Even though the free access might be limited to just the 
citation and abstract, that's still valuable. However I think the big 
deal was probably the addition of Worldcat a few months ago.
"All  of OCLC's WorldCat Heading Toward the Open  Web"
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041011-2.shtml

-Tanya



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 10:36:32 -0600
From: Karl Fast <karl.fast at pobox.com>
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Google Scholar
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Message-ID: <20041119103632.P31603 at signal.lights.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii


> What value does it add, looking at Google does not own any database
> of Scholarly content? 


Google Scholar does to the academic literature what Google News does
to current events information.

It adds value in a number of ways.

The scientific literature has a specific and explicit structure that
could be algorithmically identified and extracted. The big items
would be names of authors, institutions, journals, conferences, and
paper titles.

There is also the reference list which you can cross-reference
against the rest of the database.

By subsetting this material from the master index, you can develop
some unique features and ranking algorithms that exploit this
structure. Google provides a master interface to the "universe of
knowledge" but sometimes you want to start by filtering out a large
portion of that.

You can also add search features relevant to this subset without
polluting the master set. For example, you can do a name: search in
Google scholar to find papers by a particular author. They could
develop a rich search syntax relevant to scientific literature
without it confusing the normal Google search syntax.

This is not a new idea.

Citeseer already crawls the web for scientific literature and builds
a searchable index. Very useful. I use it regularly.

   http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ 

Google Scholar seems to be a competitor to this. Some diffs

  - It doesn't offer the same feature set as Citeseer (yet).

  - I don't know how the sizes compare. Citeseer has been around
    longer, but Google has more resources

  - Google Scholar will be more reliable and accessible. Citeseer
    is occassionally unavailable because too many people are using it

  - Google has a branding edge, as mentioned


  

--karl
http://www.livingskies.com/



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