08.26.04
Smart search - Advanced search engines link many data sources
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.