Suranah writeup for CiteSeer talk

The talk provided an overview of different search engines of the SeerSuite family. The analogy which struck me was with the Wikimedia foundation, with its many wiki- Wikipedia being the most commonly known. Sure, the Seer family is less known, collaborative and diverse, but it has a similar set of services, which may be similar to the Wiki community in its infancy.

The speaker discussed various search engines which search different areas like Chemistry, Archaeology, and even robots.txt; issues with selected search engines were also discussed. For instance, extracting a figure, and converting the information to its tabular form, which seems trivial to those in computer science, and can be a real boon to Chemists. Some interesting related anecdotes were recounted during the talk. One of these illustrated the practical need of being able to remove a file promptly to avoid lawsuits.

Other details like focused crawling and metadata extraction were also discussed. To ease the development, the space was divided into production, staging and research.

One thing I did not agree with was the speakers characterization of small and big science. He pigeonholed some branches of science like Physics as big science, as opposed to Chemistry, which he said was small science. While, such a characterization may be meaningless to how research is conducted in that particular field, it may not also be true of how data is protected. Whether a field is institutionalized and commercialized seemed to do much with respect to the how data, experiments and results were handled. An interesting comparison in Chemistry itself would be gene-sequencing for humans and other species, and study of genetic markers for chiefly anthropological ends.