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OSTIblog Articles in the Digital Object Identifier Topic

Exploring DOE’s Data

by Jannean Elliott 15 Dec, 2014 in

I’ve always been a “window shopper.”  I don’t want to go in and find the store directory, follow the little map, go up the escalator and through the racks…unless the window displays tell me it will probably be worth my time.  I tend to approach databases the same way; I want to know what’s in there.  Not only do I want some reassurance that what I need is there, but I also want to see if there’s information I may not have realized I need yet.

If you can relate, then you will love the inside view the DOE Data Explorer (DDE) offers with its (what else!) Explore feature.  Choose an Explore option from the DDE homepage to check out the most recently added content, browse the titles of every dataset or data collection, see which organizations are sponsoring what data, or discover subject areas into which those data are grouped.  The Other Organizations option will show you the originating research organizations and the host websites.

Let’s check out an example.  Maybe you’re interested in astrophysics.  “Doesn’t the Department of Energy focus mainly on natural gas resources or solar power…stuff like that?” you think.  “I should probably check the NASA homepage for astrophysics data.” But first you decide to take a quick peek at the Subject Categories option, and you find “Astronomy and Astrophysics” third from the top of the list.  Selecting that category lists 30 collections of astronomy and astrophysics data described in DDE.  Now you can explore High-Energy Cosmic Ray Event Data from the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory and lots more.

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Related Topics: data, datasets, Digital Object Identifier, DOE Data Explorer (DDE), explore, search, window shopping

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OSTI Partnering with Publishers on CrossRef and FundRef to Enhance Public Access to DOE Scientific and Technical Information

Throughout our history, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has worked to make authoritative science information ever more efficiently available to researchers and the public alike. Our core mission – ensuring access to and preservation of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research results – has not changed. But the technology we apply to that mission has changed a lot over the past 20 years. By adopting Internet technology carefully and early, pioneering new advances in that technology to meet our needs and partnering with other stakeholders in the scientific and technical information community (STI), OSTI aspires to achieve our mission better than ever before.

In 1994, OSTI actually created the first DOE home page, and we have made significant strides into the Information Age ever since, defining new electronic exchange formats, creating collections of digitized scientific and technical information and establishing an energy science and technology virtual library. OSTI also has played a leading role in developing and adopting pioneering web tools such as federated search, the simultaneous search of multiple web databases in real time via a single search query, and relevance ranking, technology that allows search results to be returned in a ranked order relevant to the search query, to enhance the diffusion of scientific knowledge.

As we reported in the last issue of the OSTI.gov Newsletter, as directed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and requested by former DOE Office of Science Director Dr. William Brinkman, OSTI is now developing a gateway that will provide public access to the gold standard of scientific communications, peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts and scientific journal articles resulting from DOE research investments.

OSTI is committed to being a leader in making the web work for DOE science, and in...

Related Topics: CrossRef, Digital Object Identifier, DOE STI, FundRef, public access, scientific information, SciTech Connect

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A (re)Birth Announcement for the DOE Data Explorer

A database and its supporting website can get periodic makeovers and sometimes it can even undergo rebirth!  The DOE Data Explorer (DDE) has just emerged from a rebirth process, and we are proud to announce its transformation.  The first version of DDE was launched in 2008 with the mission of guiding users to collections of publicly available, DOE-sponsored data and other non-text information.  Hundreds of websites were researched in order to find these collections at DOE’s labs, program offices, and user facilities, at data centers, at colleges and universities, on private sector websites such as SciVee, and across all science disciplines.  The mission has not changed, but the content has grown to include individual datasets within collections.  Now DOE boasts a new website design, better navigation, enhanced search functionality, and new features to help you analyze your search results.

The most obvious change in design, of course, is in the color scheme and the clean lines of the new pages.  DDE took inspiration from OSTI’s recently launched SciTech Connect, opting for a design that clearly says “family look and feel.”  An exciting part of the new “feel” appears on the left side of your screen every time you do a search.  Like SciTech Connect, DDE automatically breaks down the results of the search into groupings that allow you to shortcut through a long list of citations and go directly to the subset of your choice.  In DDE the groupings are based on the types of data and non-text items that were retrieved by your search term.  Search on the word “solar,” for example, and you will...

Related Topics: data, data sets, datacite, Digital Object Identifier, DOE Data Explorer (DDE), dois, non-text information, redesign

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