Federated search as a transformational technology enabling knowledge discovery: the role of WorldWideScience.org

The purpose of this paper is to describe the work of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in the US Department of Energy Office of Science and OSTI's development of the powerful search engine, WorldWideScience.org. With tools such as Science.gov and WorldWideScience.org, the patron gains access to multiple, geographically dispersed deep web databases and can search all of the constituent sources with a single query.

The paper is both historical and descriptive.

That WorldWideScience.org fills a unique niche in discovering scientific material in an information landscape that includes search engines such as Google and Google Scholar.

This is one of the few papers to describe in depth the important work being done by the US Office of Scientific and Technical Information in the field of search and discovery.