Sciencenet
Encyclopedia
Sciencenet is a distributed search engine
at KIT
– Liebel-Lab for scientific knowledge.
The Sciencenet software (YaCy
) is based on p2p
technology developed by Michael Christen in collaboration with Liebel-lab at KIT.
Popularity ranking is a powerful method for general search strategies, but less efficient for scientific knowledge. The Sciencenet search engine is especially for scientific websites and scientific content. Its index is a collection of educational (e.g. of ".edu" / ".ac.uk" /".ac.au") and research dedicated sites (e.g. the German Helmholtz society, Max Planck institutes or Swiss and Austrian universities). This is the major difference from the global YaCy
search engine ("Freeworld"), which serves as a global search engine.
" software. The "Sciencenet core cluster" is located at the Institute of Toxicology and Genetics (Liebel-Lab), KIT Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).
Sciencenet-YaCy software has been designed and tested to run in a network with at least 2000 CPUs, with up to 10 Mio
webpages per single CPU, allowing to search large and/or distributed information repositories.
/s) and dedicated PCs are required.
Ideally every research institute runs the free YaCy-Sciencenet software on 1–2 local PCs and provides its webpages to the network.
As a side effect, wasted bandwidth from external search engines is reduced to a minimum.
The sciencenet ideally provides a free, open scientific search engine index to the community.
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
at KIT
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is a German academic research and education institution with university status resulting from a merger of the university and the research center of the city of Karlsruhe. The university, also known as Fridericiana, was founded in 1825...
– Liebel-Lab for scientific knowledge.
The Sciencenet software (YaCy
YaCy
YaCy is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer networks. Its core is a computer program written in Java distributed on several hundred computers, , so-called YaCy-peers...
) is based on p2p
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
technology developed by Michael Christen in collaboration with Liebel-lab at KIT.
Background
Scientific knowledge is spread across many databases, research institutes, educational websites and literature repositories. Today's search engines success is often based on popularity ranking.Popularity ranking is a powerful method for general search strategies, but less efficient for scientific knowledge. The Sciencenet search engine is especially for scientific websites and scientific content. Its index is a collection of educational (e.g. of ".edu" / ".ac.uk" /".ac.au") and research dedicated sites (e.g. the German Helmholtz society, Max Planck institutes or Swiss and Austrian universities). This is the major difference from the global YaCy
YaCy
YaCy is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer networks. Its core is a computer program written in Java distributed on several hundred computers, , so-called YaCy-peers...
search engine ("Freeworld"), which serves as a global search engine.
Sciencenet architecture
Sciencenet is a network of Linux PCs running "YaCyYaCy
YaCy is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer networks. Its core is a computer program written in Java distributed on several hundred computers, , so-called YaCy-peers...
" software. The "Sciencenet core cluster" is located at the Institute of Toxicology and Genetics (Liebel-Lab), KIT Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).
Sciencenet-YaCy software has been designed and tested to run in a network with at least 2000 CPUs, with up to 10 Mio
Mio
Mio or MIO may refer to:*"My" or "mine" in Italian and Spanish* mio, a written abbreviation for "millions" as a unit indicator in the financial markets...
webpages per single CPU, allowing to search large and/or distributed information repositories.
Mission
Any university / research institute is encouraged to use the software and contribute to the scientific network. The software automatically connects to the "core cluster" and contributes its search engine to the distributed sciencenet network. A high speed internet broadband connection (> 2 MbitMegabit
The megabit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information or computer storage. The prefix mega is defined in the International System of Units as a multiplier of 106 , and therefore...
/s) and dedicated PCs are required.
Ideally every research institute runs the free YaCy-Sciencenet software on 1–2 local PCs and provides its webpages to the network.
As a side effect, wasted bandwidth from external search engines is reduced to a minimum.
The sciencenet ideally provides a free, open scientific search engine index to the community.
Sciencenet current status
- Currently (March 2010) 35 low cost Linux-PCs running JavaJava (programming language)Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
and YaCyYaCyYaCy is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer networks. Its core is a computer program written in Java distributed on several hundred computers, , so-called YaCy-peers...
software share ~300,000,000 documents in a distributed peer2peer network.
External links
- See the current Sciencenet network overview.
- See the participating peers with detailed index information.
- Liebel-Lab
- yacy.net