Thursday, June 4, 2009

WOLFRAM ALPHA KNOWLEDGE ENGINE: NEW SEARCH ENGINE

I have found on the news 1-2 weeks ago, the announcement for a new search engine - “Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Engine”. I have spent some time searching, but definitely more time is required to get to know it better. It is different from any other search engine I had used. It could of great interest to the sciences & engineering users; health sciences, education , finances, etc.

Read the “iLibrarian” post: Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Engine Launches, which also provides additional articles.

“Searchers using this engine can enter a question or a calculation, and rather than return relevant results, Wolfram Alpha uses its algorithms to digest the query and compute the answer based on its collection of data” …. “Scientists, researchers and techies alike will be interested in this new computational search engine which is running on R Smarr, the world’s 44th largest supercomputer, created by launch partners, R Systems…”
Do you like this search engine? Leave a comment.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

OPEN ACCESS & ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE & RESEARCH: WORKSHOP IN SOUTH AFRICA

I have participated in Gaining the momentum: Open access & advancement of Science and Research workshop, that took place on May 14, 2009 at CSIR Conference Centre, Pretoria, South Africa. The workshop was organised by Susan Veldsman, Director: Scholarly Publishing Unit, ASSAf, & Iryna Kuchma, Open Access program manager, eIFL.net.
The workshop presentations are available HERE.
Some of the important papers were:
  • Open Access for researchers: enlarged audience and citation impact, tenure and promotion. Advanced and enhanced metrics. The evidences that Open Access leads to advancement of science and research. Iryna Kuchma, eIFL.net. You can view the presentation on www.slideshare.net/irynak/
  • Academic Participation, Prof Arthur Sale, Australia: open access, mandate, participation, incentives, self-archiving, repository
  • Why SciELO? A strategic Approach to Research Publishing in South Africa, Susan Veldsman.
  • National federated searching. Prof Arthur Sale: open access, search engine, federated search, repository, Australia.
  • DuraSpace: Digital Information All way, always (European Open Repositories)

Tell us how you feel about Open Access and the benefits for Sciences and Research? Leave a comment.