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Established in 1999 with support from the National Science Foundation, DGRC is a joint research center of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California and Columbia University's Department of Computer Science.
Focus Areas
The center focuses on four types of activity:
- Information Technology research: development of advanced information systems to address critical areas of need for government agencies and citizens in online transactions;
- Digital Government community building: organization of the annual dg.o conferences that bring together staff from federal, state, and local government, researchers in IT and social sciences, and companies with a commercial interest in Digital Government;
- Production of the monthly newsmagazine dgOnline;
- NSF Digital Government program growth: organization of and participation in workshops that help develop new directions for NSF's Digital Government program.
People
A strong team of scientists and developers at both universities produces advances in database design, information integration, human-computer interaction, knowledge representation, data mining, computer networking, and other areas of interest. Experts from several Federal government agencies provide technical assistance.
Information Technology Research
Current DGRC research focuses on the access via the Internet to large, dispersed collections of government data. Government agencies at all levels collect vast amounts of statistical data. Comparing and integrating information across different sources can be extremely difficult. DGRC is developing new methods and approaches that will ultimately make government data more accessible and useful to statisticians, sociologists, policy makers, teachers, students and the public at large.
The Energy Data Collection (EDC) project at DGRC has integrated over 50,000 sets of data from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the California Energy Commission (CEC), and built an interface that allows non-expert users to request information in English (Spanish and Chinese are under development).
The OntoGrow project is working with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop techniques to extract and formalize pertinent aspects of textual descriptions of data, in order to automate linking of documents and data collections across agencies and countries.
The Argos project, with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA), and others, is integrating information systems under a web services paradigm to help improve analysis and freight flow control in the LA region.
The NeisAir project is using machine learning techniques to discover how to map and integrate air quality data collected by the California Air Resources Board and Air Quality Management Districts of the EPA.
Education and Outreach
In addition to its research activities, DGRC is involved in important educational efforts in the area of digital government, including:
Administration
As a research center DGRC is tasked with four administrative mandates:
- Direction - ensuring all necessary research issues are addressed, enforcing adherence to standards, and managing development of coherent pilot projects.
- Coordination - avoiding duplicated or nonessential research and developing shared infrastructure.
- VisibilityÑgenerating the attention necessary to develop general interest in the area of digital government and to attract future candidates for influential pilot projects.
- Sustainability - guaranteeing that pilot projects and deployed systems are maintained and remain accessible beyond the extent of a particular grant or program.
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