Award Data

The U.S. Department of Energy has started a new Solar America Initiative (SAI) to accelerate the development of advanced photovoltaic (PV) systems. Significant technological advances have been made in the area of multi-junction solar cells for concentrated PV systems. Because these cells typically are suspended at the focal point of the reflecting mirror, the support structure must provide the b ...

A major scalability problem of federated search engines, knowing which sources to search, occurs when a hundred or as many as a thousand or more sources are available to the researcher. It is not a good idea to search all possible sources for every query, as this places a heavy burden on the search framework as well as on the content provider. Placing the burden of source selection on the resear ...

Scaling issues arise in federated search environments when the number of sources searched becomes large. These problems are not well understood, as few large-scale federated search environments exist. In particular, these problems have not been studied in distributed grid-based environments. This project will design and develop a test framework to study the problems of scalability. The testbed ...

Researchers are now beginning to use tools that allow them to retrieve relevant documents from the large and ever-growing volumes of scientific information spread throughout the Internet. Once these documents are gathered or identified, researchers still need help organizing, managing, and sharing their finds with their collaborators. Currently, no tools are available to help researchers manage t ...

In searching for documents, traditional federated search engines emphasize the use of standard query parameters, such as author, title, and date range. Although most sources provide for a full-record search, users are left to guess at which terms might yield results. It would be much more useful if the search engine could provide a useful view of the search terms that actually occur in the docum ...

English-speaking federated search users are not easily able to search non-English sources of information. This leads to the loss of information potentially useful to scientists and researchers. This project will design and develop a prototype search application that takes a search query in English and returns a result list with document titles and summary information in English. The native lang ...

Search engines that access pre-indexed documents are able to quickly refer users to related documents. However, the problem becomes harder when the search engine is federating sources in real-time with no access to pre-indexed data. This project will design, build, and deploy a federated search application that quickly analyzes summary information from documents returned from a search and, in re ...

No central catalog of all high-quality scientific and technical search engines exists at the present time. Consequently, researchers may not be able to access high quality content, because they do not know about some of the sources. This project will design and test various algorithms and build prototype applications, in order to automatically identify, search, and categorize high-quality conten ...

Relevance ranking of documents retrieved from federated search sources is typically performed by analyzing the words in the document's summary information, which is provided by the underlying source. This type of analysis is highly dependent on the quality of the summary provided, which varies greatly by source, and often leads to a poor match that ranks high or to a good match that ranks poorly. ...

A federated search engine that is capable of searching, aggregating, and ranking more than a small fraction of scientific content of interest to researchers does not exist. Consequently, scientific discoveries cannot be easily found and leveraged for further advancements. This project will implement and test a number of key performance enhancements to an existing federated search product, Explor ...