The online portal Greenpilot is a service provided by the German National Library of Medicine, ZB MED. The project is funded by the

German Research Foundation The German Research Foundation ( ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2019, the DFG had a funding bud ...

(

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft The German Research Foundation ( ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2019, the DFG had a funding bu ...

) and gets its technical support from Averbis Ltd. The portal first went online May 29, 2009 and currently runs in the updated beta version. In the context of the 'Germany - Land of Ideas' (

Deutschland Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen constituent states have a total population of over 84 m ...

- Land der Ideen) initiative under the patronage of the

President of Germany The president of Germany, officially titled the Federal President of the Federal Republic of Germany (),The official title within Germany is ', with ' being added in international correspondence; the official English title is President of the F ...

Horst Köhler Horst Köhler (; 22 February 1943 – 1 February 2025) was a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, CDU ...

the ZB MED was awarded the distinction 'Selected Landmark 2009' (Ausgewählter Ort 2009).

Objective

The Greenpilot portal is a

digital library A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital resources that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital ...

specialised in the fields of Nutritional, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. It aims to provide researchers in the three fields with a collection of scientific literature which is easy to access and of high quality. Especially the

gray literature Grey literature (or gray literature) is material and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature publication types include reports ( annual, rese ...

is often difficult to find and retrieve for the average user so Greenpilot also aims to make access to these sources easier. The service addresses itself not only to scientists and students but also to the broadly interested public. Greenpilot has been modelled after the corresponding digital library for Medicine, Medpilot, also a project of the German National Library of Medicine. The ZB MED has chosen the slogan 'Greenpilot - all about life and science' as a motto. In Greenpilot scientifically relevant databases, library catalogues and websites can be searched by entering a search term and the results are presented in a standardised web interface.

Technical Background

Greenpilot is a search engine based on intuitive search engine technology. The portal's software was developed in the programming language

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

. The search engine technology is based upon the 'Averbis Search Platform' software developed by the Averbis Ltd. and uses the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software

Lucene Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a ...

. Functionally this is an expert search engine which centres around the intelligent semantic connection of search terms by means of a standardised vocabulary. This is made possible by Averbis's MSI software, which provides: * semantic search optimised for the fields of Medicine and Life Sciences * a contextual analysis of texts taking synonyms and compounds into account * multilingual and cross-language search * linking of lay and expert vocabulary The search results are generated from a search index. Additionally a

metasearch A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. ...

can be conducted in order to search other databases not contained in the index. This search is based upon individual results from the specific database searched.

The Greenpilot portal integrates various scientifically relevant information resources under a uniform search interface. These resources are diverse and encompass national and international expert databases, library catalogs of national libraries with a focus on specific topics, full text documents from

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

journals as well as information contained on about one thousand scientifically relevant websites selected for Greenpilot. The following is a list of sources from November 2009:

Library Catalogues

* Catalogue of the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED Nutrition. Environment. Agriculture) * Catalogue of the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED Medicine. Health) * Catalogue of the Bonn University Library * Library catalogues of scientifically relevant departments within the collective library network (GBV) * Catalogue of the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV) * Catalogue of the Johann Heinrich von Thünen-Institut (vTI), Federal Research Institute for Rural Areas, Forestry and Fisheries * Catalogue of the Julius Kühn-Institut, Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants * Catalogue of the Friedrich Löffler-Institut, Federal Research Institute for Animal Health * Catalogue of the Max Rubner-Institut, Federal Research Institute for Nutrition and Food * Catalogue of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment * Catalogue of the Leibniz Institute for Marine Science (IFM-GEOMAR) * Catalogue of the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK-Plant Genetics and Crop Plant) * Catalogue of the Leibniz Institute for Plant Biochemistry (IPB-Plant Chemistry) * Catalogue of the special collection inshore and deep-sea fishery * Catalogue of the

University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover The University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover (, TiHo) is a university in Hanover and one of the five facilities for veterinary medicine in Germany, and the only one that remains independent. It is often referred to as TiHo by its staff and stu ...

(TiHo-Veterinary Sciences) * Catalogue of the

German National Library of Economics The National Library of Economics (, "ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics", formerly: ''Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften'') is the world's largest research infrastructure for economic literature, online as ...

(ZBW)

Bibliographic databases

* AGRIS (1975–2008),

FAO The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; . (FAO) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition ...

(Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) * VITIS-VEA, Viticulture and Enology Abstracts * Medline (2004–2009) * UFORDAT, Environmental Research Database (UBA) * ULIDAT, Environmental Literature Database (UBA) * ELFIS, International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology

Relevant Internet Sources

* Reviewed list of

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

s selected by the ZB MED Nutrition. Environment. Agriculture * Open Access journals with full text documents

Metasearch

* GetInfo, the knowledge portal for Technical Science provided by the Library for Technical Sciences (TIB) and the professional information centres FIZ Technik Frankfurt, FIZ Karlsruhe and FIZ CHEMIE Berlin. * ECONIS, Catalogue of the German National Library of Economics (ZBW).

Other Features

Search and results page

* Search and advanced search * Context sensitive help function *

Truncation In mathematics and computer science, truncation is limiting the number of digits right of the decimal point. Truncation and floor function Truncation of positive real numbers can be done using the floor function. Given a number x \in \mathbb ...

and

Boolean function In mathematics, a Boolean function is a function whose arguments and result assume values from a two-element set (usually , or ). Alternative names are switching function, used especially in older computer science literature, and truth functi ...

s * Personalised refining of search results by filtering for a specific document type, language or database *

Bookmark A bookmark is a thin marking tool, commonly made of card, leather, or fabric, used to keep track of a reader's progress in a book and allow the reader to easily return to where the previous reading session ended. Alternate materials for book ...

Document ordering

* Ordering directly from the results page is made possible by using the document delivery service of the ZB MED or the Electronic Journals Library ( Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek).

Personalisation

* My Greenpilot: a feature requiring the user to sign up for an account. The service is free of charge and offers an overview of ordered documents as well as enabling individual managing of customer data.

References

External links

Greenpilot website

* ttp://www.land-of-ideas.org Germany - Land of Ideas website {{Authority control Libraries in Germany Information retrieval systems Internet search engines