January 2003 - Vol. 46 No. 1

January 2003 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Editorial pointers

Editorial Pointers

We enter the new year exploring the burgeoning partnership of computer information science and government information service. This once-improbable pairing of researchers and civil servants is now a worldwide phenomenon, as IT continues to infiltrate all levels of government activity, affecting practically every aspect of the way government does business, particularly interacting with and disseminating […]
News News tracks

News Tracks

The world’s smallest logic circuit ever created has been developed by IBM scientists at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. The entire circuit is less than a trillionth of a square inch; the equivalent circuit made from state-of-the-art silicon transistors takes up 260,000 times as much space. Instead of using the transistors and […]
Opinion Forum

Forum

Pamela Samuelson’s “Legally Speaking” column (“Reverse Engineering Under Siege,” Oct. 2002) does a masterful job of explaining how a court’s interpretation of a law can affect the legitimate work of researchers and technologists. ACM members and other Communications readers might be interested to learn that USACM, the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM, signed […]
Research and Advances Digital government

Introduction

Information technologies are being applied vigorously by governmental units at national, regional, and local levels around the world. The application of IT to government service is often termed "e-government" and the larger concept of government that depends upon IT to achieve basic missions is termed "digital government." This distinction is, of course, lexically arbitrary, but serves to distinguish R&D specifically aimed at creating techniques for applying IT to government operations. Such R&D efforts also consider the long-term impact of these applications on citizens and government itself.
Research and Advances Digital government

Coplink: Managing Law Enforcement Data and Knowledge

In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, major government efforts to modernize federal law enforcement authorities' intelligence collection and processing capabilities have been initiated. At the state and local levels, crime and police report data is rapidly migrating from paper records to automated records management systems in recent years, making them increasingly accessible.
Research and Advances Digital government

Geospatial Decision Support For Drought Risk Management

Drought affects virtually all regions of the world and results in significant economic, social, and environmental impacts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates annual drought-related losses in the U.S. at $6--$8 billion, which is more than any other natural hazard. Congress enacted the Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000 to encourage the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA) and farmers to be more proactive in managing drought risk.
Research and Advances Digital government

Harvesting Information to Sustain Forests

We are building a Web-based system to provide easy access to documents for use by natural resource managers, scientists, and other interested parties in the Pacific Northwest. Initially, we are focusing on the Adaptive Management Area Program (www.fs.fed.us/r6/plan/adapt.htm) with the USDA Forest Service as the lead government partner in collaboration with natural resource management specialists from the USDI Bureau of Land Management, USDI Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as other agencies and groups.
Research and Advances Digital government

-Understanding New Models of Collaboration For Delivering Government Services

In the last decade, countries all over the globe have sought to deliver public services through new working relationships among governments and private and nonprofit organizations. The defining characteristic of these collaborations is the voluntary combination of separate organizations into a coherent service delivery system supported by advanced IT. The rapid evolution of these technologies […]
Research and Advances Digital government

Geospatial It For Mobile Field Data Collection

Federal statistical agencies generate critical data about the nation's population, economy, and natural resources. This data is gathered largely by mobile field data collection. Although geospatial information is an essential reference material in the field and serves as a base for recording spatially linked data, it is nearly always used in printed form due to limitations in mobile computing systems and tools for handling geospatial data. The ability to interact with digital geospatial data in the field offers significant enhancements for data quality and operational efficiencies. However, basic research is needed on extensible infrastructure designs for limited field computing environments and appropriate field tools for mobile data gatherers.
Research and Advances Digital government

Using an Ontology to Simplify Data Access

When we turn to government for information, we expect it to be timely, thorough, and above all accurate. However, we also demand that government be split in many different ways—federal, state, and local; executive, judicial, and legislative; tax management separated from pensions and health. Moreover, government data should be collected at different times by different […]
Research and Advances Digital government

Bistro: a Scalable and Secure Data Transfer Service For Digital Government Applications

Government at all levels is a major collector and provider of data.Our project focuses on the collection of data over wide-area networks (WANs) and addresses the scalability issues that arise in the context of Internet-based massive data collection applications. Furthermore, security, due to the need for privacy and integrity of the data, is a central issue for data collection applications that use a public infrastructure such as the Internet. Numerous digital government applications require data collection over WANs [5].One compelling example of such an application is the Internal Revenue Service's electronic submission of income tax forms. Other digital government applications include collecting census data, federal statistics, and surveys; gathering and tallying of electronic votes; collecting crime data for the U.S. Justice department; collecting data from sensors for disaster response applications; collecting data from geological surveys; collecting electronic filings of patents, permits, and securities (for SEC) applications; grant proposals and contract bids submissions; and so on. All these applications have scalability and security needs in common.The poor performance that may be experienced by current digital government users, given the existing state of technology (as in Figure 1a), is largely due to how (independent) data transfers using TCP/IP work over the Internet. TCP/IP is good at equally sharing bandwidth between data streams, which in large-scale applications can lead to poor performance for individual clients (as they receive only a very small share of this bandwidth). Given that TCP/IP is here to stay for the foreseeable future, what is needed is a scalable yet cost- effective solution that can be easily deployed over the existing Internet technology.We are designing and developing a system called Bistro, which addresses the scalability needs of digital government data collection applications while allowing them to share the same infrastructure and resources efficiently, cost-effectively, and securely [1]. Bistro's basic approach is to introduce intermediate hosts---bistros---which allow replacement of a traditionally "synchronized client push" approach with a "nonsynchronized combination of client-push and server-pull" approach (as depicted in Figure 1b). This in turn allows spreading of the workload on the destination server and the network over time, with subsequent elimination of hot spots as well as significant improvements in performance for both clients and servers. Our ongoing research [2, 4] indicates that orders of magnitude of improvement can be achieved with the Bistro architecture and the corresponding data collection algorithms it affords.Bistro's design allows for a gradual deployment and experimentation over the Internet (by simply downloading Bistro server software and installing it on public servers). Bistro's security protocol and trust structure [3] are designed such that only encrypted data travels through (not necessarily trusted) bistros. This means a government agency does not need to trust bistros installed by other agencies or commercial institutions. At the same time, these (untrusted) bistros can significantly improve the agency's data collection performance. Each application (within each agency) can have its own scalability, security, fault tolerance, and other data collection needs, and these applications and agencies can still share available resources, if so desired, across all Bistro servers.We believe an appropriately designed single infrastructure such as Bistro can address all digital government wide-area data collection needs in a scalable, secure, and cost-effective manner. (For more information, see bourbon.usc.edu/iml/bistro/.
Research and Advances Digital government

Supporting Statistical Electronic Table Usage By Citizens

Over 70 agencies at the federal level are charged with collecting data and producing and disseminating statistics. These statistics are used to inform government policy, shape health care initiatives, provide information on the state of the economy, and others. They also have significant impact on the lives of citizens who use the statistics, for example, to determine job opportunities, changes in social security benefits, and quality of life in particular areas. Our digital government project developed several specific technologies to support the location, manipulation, and understanding of a quintessential format for statistical information---the table.
Research and Advances Digital government

Supporting Visual Analysis of Federal Geospatial Statistics

Federal government agencies generate, summarize, and disseminate a large and growing volume of statistical data that can be linked through common geospatial referencing. The potential of this data is often unrealized because agencies and their data users lack usable and useful data analysis tools that support multivariate geospatial data exploration and processing.
Research and Advances Digital government

-se of the Sand Spatial Browser For Digital Government Applications

Numerous federal agencies produce official statistics made accessible to ordinary citizens for searching and data retrieval. This is frequently done via the Internet through a Web browser interface. If this data is presented in textual format, it can often be searched and retrieved by such attributes as topic, responsible agency, keywords, or press release. However, if the data is of spatial nature, for example, in the form of a map, then using text-based queries is often too cumbersome for the intended audience. We describe the use of the SAND Spatial Browser to provide more power to users of these databases by enabling them to define and explore the specific spatial region of interest graphically. The SAND Spatial Browser allows users to form either purely spatial or mixed spatial/nonspatial queries intuitively, which can present information to users that might have been missed if only a textual interface was available.
Research and Advances Digital government

Efficient Summarization of Spatiotemporal Events

Raster datasets at discrete temporal instances capture a variety of spatiotemporal phenomena. These phenomena and the respective datasets that capture them may span various spatial and temporal scales, like a car's trajectory as it is captured by various cameras at video rates, or the long-term erosion of a river's edge captured by an annual series of aerial imagery.
Research and Advances Digital government

It Research, Innovation, and E-Government

Over the past few years, the basic outline of an e-government vision has emerged, and government has taken promising steps to deploy e-government services. Much remains to be done, however, both in implementing e-government services and in developing new technologies and concepts, if the e-government vision is to be broadly realized. A recent study by the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board [2] examines several aspects of this challenge. It identifies areas where government is a demand leader for IT, explores the roles of IT researchers in risk-managed e-government innovation, and discusses approaches that can help accelerate innovation and foster the transition of innovative technologies from the lab to operational systems.
Research and Advances Digital government

A Personal History of the Nsf Digital Government Program

The NSF Digital Government Program has its roots (circa 1993) in the NSF High-Performance Computing and Communications Program, and NSF's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. It was the creation of NCSA's Mosaic software suite of browsers and servers that prompted Larry Brandt, then a Program Manager for the NSF Supercomputer Centers Program, to start promoting a concept of driving innovative IT into government functions and services. At the time, I was Deputy Assistant Director for Computer Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE)1 and Brandt invited me to look at a demo of Mosaic. I was amazed and felt privileged to gaze into the future of a new software paradigm---the genesis of the Web.
Opinion Inside risks

The Mindset of Dependability

Computer software is legendary for its production time and cost overruns, and for its fragility after it is written. The U.S. government failed trying to procure dependable software for the IRS and the FAA, and the U.K. government was recently accused of wasting more than one billion pounds on failed or overdue information technology contracts. […]

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