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dg.o2004 - Digital Government Research, e-Government Solutions
DG Projects Show Promising New Research, Proven Street-Level Application at the 5th National Conference on Digital Government Research
By Mack Reed
DGRC Communications Manager
In but one year, the field of Digital Government research has grown considerably and taken on a new mantle of maturity.
By May, 2003, the fast-growing DG research community was beginning to coalesce into a collection of smaller communities busily defining research agendas for their disciplines, and exploring core principles, practices and technologies.
This month, as dg.o2004 convenes in Seattle, the field has gained
- its own scholarly journal;
- potential new alliances with DG researchers in the European Union; and
- a broad array of projects ranging from street-level applications of DG-born technology to wide-ranging policy studies and raw research of the latest IT problems challenging government agencies at all levels.
This diversity will be on full display with nearly 100 presentations - research papers, Project Highlights, panel discussions and live system demonstrations - covering bioinformatics, public policy, homeland security, disaster response, management of complex data, system interoperability, data privacy and more.
The conference kicks off with a keynote address by Keith Rhodes, chief technologist for the U.S. General Accounting office. The published proceedings of dg.o2004 will be distributed at the conference, and posted on DigitalGovernment.org shortly afterward.
Until then, here are previews of just a few presentations showing the richness of the DG community's work:
Web Accessibility for Older Adults
Shirley Ann Becker
Northern Arizona University
Project Highlight presentation: Tuesday, 1:30 p.m.
Download Project Highlight abstract |
Home page
In the absence of a common, strictly adhered to set of usability standards, the Internet - including many government Web sites - has developed willy-nilly, leaving some users with impaired vision or other physical difficulties out of the information revolution. Researchers at Northern Arizona University have been working on applications to improve design and evaluation of government web interfaces, and is working to disseminate their findings to a wide audience. One such tool, DOTTIE, delivers automatic feedback on a chosen web page's accessibility and the potential barriers to usability that its authors may have built into it unknowingly. Additional tools include the Usability Enforcer, GraphicAnalyzer, and Aging Vision Simulator, the last of which darkens and yellows sample web images to illustrate the impact of aging vision on usability.
Exploration and Exploitation: Knowledge Sharing In Digital Government Projects
Maria Christina Binz-Scharf
Harvard University
Research paper presentation: Wednesday, 10:30 a.m.
Understanding the way governments develop and use information technology is the challenge at the core of one of the Digital Government Research Program's faster-growing subdisciplines - organizational analysis and inter-/intra-governmental relations.
Maria Binz-Scharf examined knowledge-sharing practices and policies in digital government development projects in the U.S. and Switzerland and concludes in her paper that such development occurs in two phases - conception, during which sparse networks of colleagues exploring the issues and knowledge they share, followed by implementation, which sees teams and more tightly-bound groups exploring and then exploiting shared information.
Successfully Adopting IT for Social Welfare Program Management
Dean Duncan, Hye-Chung (Monica) Kum, Kimberly Flair and Wei Wang
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research paper presentation: Tuesday, 10:30 a.m.
System demo: Tuesday, 4 p.m.
Related poster presentation: Monday, 7 p.m.
Home page |
WorkFirst toolset
Research Paper: While some DG projects explore theories and experiment with different methods of handling data or enhancing interoperability, many have developed technology that has progressed past the point of tech transfer to where they are readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. This UNC-Chapel Hill team's has produced a system of database query tools that calls on a database of 442,000 families and 1,002,000 individuals that have received assistance in North Carolina at any time since January, 1995. The system allows anyone - social service workers, journalists, welfare recipients themselves - to track the progress of welfare reform in North Carolina.
Working with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, the team has expanded a set of data-management tools from the smaller Work First program to apply it to the larger Food Stamp program, which is taking in 17,000 new clients per month across the state.
Among the insights the UNC team's paper offers on successful tech transfer: "... [K]eeping applications light (i.e. inexpensive to maintain and support) is one of the most important aspects of successfully transferring IT to government agencies."
Automated Dental Identification System (ADIS)
Gamal Fahmy1, Diaa Eldin M. Nassar1, Eyad Haj-Said1, Hong Chen2, Omima Nomir3, Jindan Zhou3, Robert Howell1, Hany H. Ammar1, Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb3 and Anil K. Jain2
1) West Virginia University, 2) Michigan State University, 3) University of Miami
System demo: Monday, 7 p.m.
Project Highlight presentation, Tuesday, 10:30 a.m.
Download Project Highlight abstract | Home page
In case of plane crashes or catastrophic disasters, a corpse's unique dental profile is sometimes all that post-mortem examiners can rely upon for identifying the victim.
Three teams of Digital Government researchers have been developing a toolset to automate the laborious process of combing through dental records by use of digital image processing, pattern recognition and soft-computing and putting the system to work behind a Web interface accessible by workstations far from the database.
Transnational Digital Government
José Fortes
University of Florida (on behalf of the TDG team)
Project Highlight presentation: Monday, 1:30 p.m.
System demo: Monday, 7 p.m.
Download Project Highlight abstract |
Home page
Drug interdiction can be a challenging mission, particularly when the work must take place across international borders. For several years, the team headed by Dr. Fortes has working on a distributed software system that permits member agencies in the U.S., Belize an the Dominican Republic to overcome language differences via:
- Spoken dialogue systems for data collection, training and learning;
- Data management and security techniques for rule -based data sharing and filtering;
- Machine translation technology for sharing documents across different languages and countries ;
- Middleware for transnational (heterogeneous) information grids that enable private, secure and dependable automation of collaboration processes and policies, and the delivery of computing services through Internet portals; and
- Network behavior modeling and optimization for delivery of acceptable quality of service.
The web-based toolset is being tested in the U.S. and Belize, with expansion to the Dominican Republic scheduled for later this year.
Detecting Anomalous Geospatial Trajectories through Spatial Characterization and Spatio-Semantic Associations
Vandana P. Janeja, Vijayalakshmi Atluri and Nabil R. Adam
Rutgers University
Research paper presentation: Wednesday, 10:30 a.m.
Related poster presentation: Tuesday, 4 p.m.
Research paper - In the growing use of investment in technology to aid homeland security, there is increasing need for systems that can track anomalies that might indicate illegal activity. Biometric-measuring applications can be used to pull suspects from the crowd at an airport. And phone tracing systems can detect increases in cellphone traffic in specific areas.
A team of researchers at Rutgers University has been working on methods of detecting anomalous trajectories - sequences of events that are mapped by use of geospatial data - as a way of seeking to detect illegal shipments or border crossings that might point to terrorist activity. Working with the U.S. Customs Bureau of Customs & Border Protection, the team used a system of mapping that generates geospatial entities called spatial units (such as a city associated with spatial coordinates and other economic, agricultural and spatial data). They then grouped these into "micro neighborhoods" that were, in turn, grouped into "macro neighborhoods."
Using data from 17 cities grouped in this fashion, they experimented with different methods of detecting anomalous patterns in the data. Their research paper, to be presented at the conference, outlines that process.
GeoCollaborative Crisis Management (GCCM)
Alan M. MacEachren, Guoray Cai, Sven Fuhrmann, Michael McNeese, Rajeev Sharma
Pennsylvania State University
System demo: Monday, 7 p.m.
Project Highlight presentation: Monday, 1:30 p.m.
Download Project Highlight abstract |
Home page
The 9/11 terrorist attacks - and subsequent manmade and natural disasters since - have brought the need for better information management into sharp focus. In this project, Penn State scientists are developing a toolset for facilitating group work using geospatial information. Collaborating with partners at a veritable alphabet's worth of federal agencies - EPA, HHS, NIMA, USGS, NASA and state partners in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Florida, the researchers are
- developing a deep understanding of group work with geospatial information and technology and
- developing advanced geospatial technology to support both same-place and distributed, dialogue-enabled, collaborative crisis management activities
Toward the Statistical Knowledge Network
Gary Marchionini and Stephanie Haas,
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill;
Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant,
University of Maryland - College Park;
Carol A Hert, Syracuse University
Project Highlight presentation: Monday, 3:30 p.m.
Related poster presentation: Monday, 7 p.m.
Download Project Highlight abstract |
Home page
Using an XML/metadata-driven backbone, this team has been developing web-based tools for the acquisition, categorizing and distribution of the vast array of data types, sources and formats collected by government agencies.
The Statistical Knowledge Network is based upon a consortium of participating agencies and a registry architecture that enables standardization of basic information used to categorize statistics. It also allows its users to contribute to, search, display, annotate, understand, manipulate and collaborate with others on metadata stored in the database, giving them common access to and control over the actual datasets, which reside on the agencies' own servers.
The research team is working with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to evaluate interfaces for the toolset, and developing an ontology to help define and catalog the metadata gleaned from the myriad, disparate statistical datasets.
Current Practices in E-Government-induced Business Process Change (BPC)
Hans J. (Jochen) Scholl
University of Washington
Research paper presentation: Monday, 3:30 p.m.
Research paper: Amidst the earliest research into Digital Government technologies, a sort of meta-discussion emerged on the way that IT was changing government, and the effect government had on IT development. While early e-government strategies focused on disseminating government information, later technology has offered government agencies new methods of doign business - and thus begun changing the way the agencies do business internally and - via the Web - externally.
Study of this dynamic has evolved into the growing DG subdiscipline of e-rulemaking and the general study by policy and organizational scholars of the methods and effects of e-government. Hans Scholl concludes, among other things, that one of the most vital components of successful business-process change is participation by and input from stakeholders - the people inside the agencies and out in the public who use e-government systems and have an interest in the way an agencydoes business.
As his paper reports, "Among the MOST FREQUENTLY CITED REASONS for stakeholder involvement were (1) the experience of past project failure or underutilization, (2) smoother project execution, (3) better need assessment, (4) more focused project orientation, and (5) acceptance of project outcomes including information systems."
Indexing Distributed Complex Data for Complex Queries
Egemen Tanin, Aaron Harwood (University of Melbourne)
and Hanan Samet (University of Maryland at College Park)
Research paper presentation, Monday, 3:30 p.m.
Research paper: As government agencies begin to explore sharing their data, the task of melding incompatible datasets has grown into one of the premier challenges facing Digital Government researchers who work in the realm of complex data.
This research team is experimenting with hash-based indexing and querying disparate datasets over P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. While keyword searching in such instances can limit the precision and success of data queries, the team's experiments on geospatial data with distributed hash algorithms have been delivering much better results, its paper reports.
"We showed that our index can scale well while a client-server based index will be swamped with a few queries and downloads," the paper concludes. "We are in the process of refining our algorithms and we plan to further test our work in the near future. We believe many Digital Government applications can use the results of this research to access massively distributed datasets."
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