By Calvin Mackey, STI Computer Engineer

On March 1, 2011, the STI Program Office rolled out an upgraded public interface to its database, the NASA Technical Report Server (http://ntrs.nasa.gov), which is powered by the Endeca Guided Navigation search engine. Menus are automatically driven from the existing metadata without the use of additional taxonomies. A taxonomy is a type of classification system to help aid search. Currently, most search engines rely heavily on taxonomy usage. Users are regularly familiar with requested database content.  Instead of utilizing an empty search box, which offers very little assistance to the user regarding requested database content, NTRS calculates a set of menus from the metadata, integrated with a full-featured search engine. A quick glance at the specified navigation menus enables the user to ask specific questions, thereby narrowing the search.

Users can search within a browse or browse within a search. Its search engine provides automatic, algorithmic spelling corrections and/or suggestions. The NTRS database includes a myriad of technical terms that can easily be misspelled. When the user misspells a word within a search, NTRS searches for words that are similar, versus utilizing the “Did you mean?” message. This upgrade includes full-text search, simple and advanced search screens, citation downloading, and citation sharing via social networking tools. It also includes a Concept Cloud as a visualization and search-refinement feature. 

All NTRS driven navigation and search options are captured in the browser URL. This design enables users to save and share any view of the data by book marking the link or cutting and pasting it into an e-mail message. This particular function is extremely beneficial to professional and lay users alike. Due to the fact that search results are often utilized by teams and organizations, the dissemination of such results decreases search time exponentially and users are able to work smarter.

The NTRS system enables knowledge discovery. Other data sources, for example NIX (http://nix.nasa.gov/) are integrated into this collection. All search results are relevance-ranked based on the field of search term (matches found in titles are ranked above matches found in the description) and frequency of search term occurrence. Results are not simply sorted by date.

In summary, using this application will add new features and give our users a richer search experience. For further details, please contact the NASA Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI) at help@sti.nasa.gov.

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