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GCN Home > 08/23/04 issue

Smart search

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Advanced search engines link many data sources

A commercial search engine ties together multiple pharmaceutical databases for the Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Evaluation and Research Center.

A different search engine is helping the Nuclear Regulatory Commission level the mounds of paperwork for upcoming hearings on radioactive waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, Nev. At both agencies, the search engines must interface with widely varying formats and repositories.

FDA and NRC decided to give their employees and others access through a browser interface, rather than building data warehouses to aggregate the volumes of information.

“The nice thing is that we don’t have to store it all,” said Helen Mitchell, enterprise search product manager at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which built a search gateway to 15 data repositories. “All we have to do is point to and index it.”

With so many government repositories available, employees often squander time doing the same searches with different search engines, said Dave Connor, federal vice president for search engine provider Convera Corp. of Vienna, Va.

Connor said he has seen analysts at intelligence agencies spend most of their days jumping from one search engine to another, trying to find information on a single topic.

Convera, like other search vendors, sells an alternative approach. Agencies buy a basic search package and add modules to access specific formats, Connor said.

“Most of our government customers collect information from multiple repositories,” said John Cronin, government sector vice president at search vendor Autonomy Corp. PLC of Cambridge, England. “They have multiple file servers, databases and intranet Web pages,” Cronin said. “In the old days, they’d do a brute-force integration and build a data warehouse. But you don’t have to—you can leave things in their various formats and locations, and they can appear to be integrated.”

The Center for Drug Evaluation and Research set up a single search page with RetrievalWare software from Convera so its 2,500 scientific reviewers could collect data more efficiently for investigations. The workers “basically can make a single integrated query of all the different libraries,” Mitchell said.

More news on related topics: New Products / Technology, Web Strategies