[Photograph by: Korean Institute of Science and Technology Information]
The WorldWideScience Alliance was formalized on June 12, 2008, in Seoul, Korea, by officials from 11 organizations representing 38 countries. WorldWideScience.org is the online gateway to science information issued from nations around the world. The signing ceremony was the culminating event at the ICSTI 2008 General Assembly, hosted by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. Dr. Walter Warnick, Director of OSTI, which is Operating Agent for WorldWideScience.org, is pictured fourth from left. The Department of Energy was represented by Dr. Jeffrey Salmon, Associate Under Secretary for Science (seventh from left).
Since becoming Director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in 1997, Dr. Warnick has championed an aggressive effort to capitalize on technological advances to provide state-of-the-art information tools and services to the DOE community, intergovernmental and international partners, students and the public. During his tenure at OSTI, groundbreaking tools have made DOE information access quicker, cheaper, more convenient, and more complete than ever before.
For example, the DOE Science Accelerator provides one-stop searching of recent R&D results (including thousands of full-text technical reports and over one million e-print documents as well as science conference papers and proceedings), legacy R&D results (from 1943 to present), R&D project summaries and other science sources.
New technology has been used to improve scientific and technical information management across the entire DOE complex. The Scientific and Technical Information Program, coordinated by OSTI, has successfully transitioned the DOE complex so that R&D results recorded in digital documents remain digital throughout their entire life cycle.
Recognizing that the boundaries of science disciplines do not necessarily coincide with organizational boundaries, Dr. Warnick championed the interagency development of Science.gov, the gateway for R&D results and related government science information, and WorldWideScience.org, its international counterpart.
Science.gov was created in 2002 through collaboration of 10 Federal research agencies; the Science.gov Alliance currently includes 16 scientific and technical organizations within 12 federal agencies – representing approximately 96 percent of the federal government's R&D budget. OSTI facilitated the development of innovative technology, deployed in Science.gov, which enables access and search (of both metadata and full text) of huge databases of R&D resources of the various agencies as well as relevancy ranking of results, plowing new ground in deep Web search technology. The Web portal brings together close to 50 million pages of text stemming from hundreds of billions of dollars of government R&D.
WorldWideScience.org, launched in Nancy, France in June 2007, is the global science portal to science sources from around the world. The portal is estimated at over 200 million pages of science information, accelerates scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of global scientific databases.
Dr. Warnick's vision for the future rests on the premise that emerging computing power and fast networks have only just begun to revolutionize scientific communication. "As the nation embarks on a new Science Information Infrastructure, text and communication tools will continue to play a central role in ways not yet imagined," said Dr. Warnick. "But that's what OSTI is all about. As the information technology revolution rapidly evolves, we at OSTI will continue to fulfill our mandate to make DOE research information available. We are eager to help shape the future."
In 2005, Warnick was elected an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) [exit federal site] Fellow in the Information, Computing, and Communication section "for leadership in the federal scientific information community and for contributions to the conceptualization, development and implementation of innovative programs that significantly advance access to government information."
In April 2004, Dr. Warnick was chosen by the Public Printer of the United States to serve a three-year term on the 15-member Depository Library Council. "These individuals have dedicated their lives to ensuring that every American has access to Government information," said Public Printer Bruce James of the 2004 appointees. Also in 2004 Dr. Warnick was appointed chair of CENDI, an interagency working group of senior Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Managers from 12 U.S. federal agencies. CENDI is committed to addressing science- and technology-based national priorities and strengthening U.S. competitiveness.
In 2001, Dr. Warnick received both the Department of Energy Information Technology Quality Award for Executive Leadership and the government-wide IRMCO (Interagency Resources Management Conference) Individual Award for demonstration of exceptional ability to operate across organizational boundaries to improve the Government's service to its people.
From 1980 to 1994, Dr. Warnick represented the DOE research program on the interagency National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program where he emphasized that scientific findings must always be derived from experimental and observational evidence. Dr. Warnick obtained a bachelor's degree in engineering science from The Johns Hopkins University, and MS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland.
