The Synergy of

Federated Searching & Clustering

Lunch with Peter Jacso

ALA Midwinter ForumProQuest and Serials Solution

Seattle, January 19, 2007

 

Jacso

While You Savor the Lunch, Allow Me

• To give credit to past pioneers like Roger Summit of DIALOG for ONESearching & RANKing

• To tip the hat to some of the most widely used federated search engines and clustering tools

• To salute some who offer INTRA-system metasearching of in-house and domesticated, prepped databases + clustering

• To appreciate the synergy of federated searching and clustering by multiple elements (Central Search)

• To guess what the future will look like

Jacso

Yes, Pat, there has been multi-searching and clustering since the 1980s

Jacso

RANKing

Jacso

DIALINDEX for a Scoreboard

Jacso

CLUSTERING THE SET BY Journal Name

Jacso

CLUSTERING THE SET BY descriptors

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CLUSTERING THE SET BY author

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CLUSTERING THE SET BY year

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Some of the federated, meta- and polysearch engines

Jacso

A Light Clustering Toolbar

Jacso

A Tad Too Narrow Source Base

Jacso

The Little Engine That Could

Jacso

Clustering by subject, sources, site URLs

Jacso

The BIG Search Engine That Could Even Better …Including Science Direct, Elsevier’s Digital Collection?

Jacso

Except when it shouldn’t ….

Jacso

…. or couldn’t

Jacso

How Could I Forget Thee, Google Scholar

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Even if you are in beta

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… and have been for 2 years

Jacso

HWP Can Do It More Smartly with Vivisimo (but limited to subject)

Jacso

Scopus was born with clustering by 5 criteria

Jacso

WoS offers more clusters to choose from

Jacso

Like clustering by affiliation

Jacso

And finally someone clusters OPAC result (with Endeca!) That someone is Andrew K. Pace and his team at NCSU

Jacso

And someone else, too, wants OPACs look betterwith an Open Access Software

That someone is Casey Bisson at Plymouth State University

Jacso

FEEL THEIR PAIN

Intra-system metasearching of in-house & hosted,

domesticated databases with clustering is easier than …

 

……to federate from diverse, disparate, deviant sources and to cluster

the uncontrolled, inconsistent format and content of author names, journal names, descriptors

The aggravation of aggregation

Herding cats and faculty on short notice looks easy

 

Jacso

PolyMeta open access sources

Jacso

Subject-only clustering, but many other bonuses

Jacso

Meet Dr. Tamás Doszkocs and his ToxSeek PolyMeta engine at NLM

Jacso

Jacso

My customized version for testing & teaching purposes

Jacso

And Now ….. Central Search 

Many databases federated

and

many results clustered

by

many criteria

Jacso

Several ProQuest databases in cluster

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Several Ebsco databases in cluster

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Mixture of hits from different databases

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Clustered sources

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Results sorted by date

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Number of duplicates from different sources may indicate clout of journal, or just re-

purposing

Jacso

Keep looking at shopping & price comparison sites to see the future

Jacso

Clusters by departure & arrival times, airlines and stoips

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Shop till you drop through the clusters by shoe types

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And by color, size, width and price

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Look for the future also in the many PubMed wizardry projects (top related terms co-

occurring with toxoplasmosis)

Jacso

Relative research interest on toxoplasmosis

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Profiles of top journals on toxoplasmosis

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Profiles of top authors and their publications

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Cluster of most productive countries on toxoplasmosis

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Mapped to an atlas

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THE FUTURE

• Terminology consolidation

• The potential of the ULAN Getty Project

• “Did you mean”-ing at a higher level

• Tandem clustering of 2 cluster criteria

• “Just in case”-ing of non-selected databases

• Meshing with related factographic data

• Bibliometric analysis for collection development &

publishing venue selection

• Visualization2 of search results

Jacso

Will he say “Right on”? Will this “love story” of federated searching &

clustering have a happy-end?

Jacso