Yigal Arens, USCISI, CoDirector of DGRC

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• Yigal Arens, USC/ISI, Co-Director of DGRC
• Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, Director of Research (ISI)

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• Co-Directors
• Yigal ArensUSC / Information Sciences Institute
• Salvatore Stolfo (Judith Klavans)Columbia
  University

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DGRCs Purpose

• Make Digital Government Happen!
• Advance information systems research
• Bring the benefits of cutting edge IS research to
  government systems
• Help educate government and the community

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Why a Center?

• Direction
• Coordination
• Visibility
• Sustainability

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DGRC Technical Goals

• Conduct and support research in key areas of
  information systems
• Develop standards/interfaces
• Develop infrastructure
• Build pilot systems

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DGRC Educational Efforts

• DG conferences
• dg.o 2000, 5/2000
• dg.o 2001, 5/2001
• Collaboration workspace
• Newsletter DG Online

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DGRC Composition

• So far, primarily computer scientists
• User interfaces, information integration,
  databases, natural language processing,
  information security, data mining,
• Now also Human factors
• Our plans Social sciences

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Major Research Thrusts

• Terminology/ontology
• Information integration
• Human-computer interaction
• Soon
• In-memory data analysis
• Multi-lingual access
• Usability

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Current DGRC Research

• Support specific applications
• Access to/interpretation of statistical data
• Web site integration
• Central problems attacked
• Proliferation of terminology
• Difficulty requesting and interpreting data
• Need to integrate data from autonomous sources

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Our Experience So Far

• Problem nicely defined in proposal, based on
  discussions with agencies
• Access multiple sources from 4 agencies
• Support querying over the Web
• But access directly to data turned out to be
  impossible!
• Only already public data could be used
• The queryable space is very sparse

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Consequences for Research

• Significant shifting of emphasis, to
• Extraction of information from public sources
  Web sites, PDF files, text
• Special subproblems Ontology browsing, ontology
  merging, understanding PDF,
• Support for existing reports
• In-memory data manipulation and analysis
• We were lucky to have had broad experience and a
  wide array of talent to draw on

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For More Information

• Visit http//www.dgrc.org
• Read newsletter soon
• Ask for report of last years dg.o2000 digital
  government workshop
• Attend this years digital government conference
  dg.o2001

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dg.o 2001

• First annual NSF-sponsored digital government
  conference
• May 20-23, 2001
• Los Angeles, California
• Well, actually in Redondo Beach
• CFP, registration and information
• http//www.dgrc.org/dg.o2001

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Research in Detail