The ever-increasing volume of information available electronically, especially via the Internet, can be of great value to DoD researchers, but it is becoming increasingly easy to be inundated by all of the information. Increased coupling the popular dissemination technologies (i.e. the World-Wide Web) with tools designed to deal with large amounts of information (i.e. commercial database management systems) will be not only useful, but eventually invaluable in helping DoD researchers deal effectively with the glut of information.
Domain-specific search engines represent a scalable alternative to attempting to maintain a global search capability for the World-Wide Web (which the popular WWW search engines are finding increasingly hard to do). With the help of domain specialists to identify appropriate targets for indexing, a domain-specific search engine can provide DoD researchers with information repositories which are more easily accessible, can be kept more current, and are more efficient to use than global search engines. These information repositories can stand alone, or can compliment other resources such as software repositories, database-backed archives of topical mailing lists, etc.
This project will deploy the infrastructure to create domain-specific WWW search engines at CEWES and assist in the development of search engines in two domains to demonstrate the power of this idea. The subject of grid generation is of great importance to the CFD and CSM CTAs as well as some CWO models, areas which consume the majority of the CEWES MSRC's computational resources. The grid generation search engine will compliment the CTA-specific software repositories which are being developed under a cross-MSRC initiative, also lead by NPAC. The other area, which is of great importance to the Corps of Engineers, is geographical information systems (GIS). In this case, the repository will stand alone, but we envision that it may form the core of a more sophisticated information repository in the future, perhaps including a GIS software repository and other database-backed tools.