Achieving a High Level of Scalability in Federated Information Retrieval

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, Explorit, to enable the searching of thousands of sources by thousands of users. In Phase I, Explorit was instrumented with performance-monitoring tools and a number of performance bottlenecks were identified. Phase II will continue the enhancement of the federated search engine by developing and utilizing sophisticated performance monitoring tools.Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: The improved search engine should be of use to national laboratories, major research-oriented universities, and the research departments of large corporations (including pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and oil and gas companies). Legal research firms and financial institutions represent other potential markets.