::: ABOUT DGRC :::

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The Digital Government Research Center (DGRC) was established in 1999 with the support of the National Science Foundation. DGRC is a collaboration between the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) and Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. DGRC is headquartered at USC/ISI.

People

A strong team of university-based scientists and developers at DGRC represents expertise in text processing, database information integration, human-computer interaction, knowledge representation, data mining, computer networking, security, ontologies, and other areas relevant to government. Since 1999, projects with collaborators in various other institutions have worked with experts from several Federal government agencies on a variety of research topics.

Center Activities

The center focuses on four types of activity:

• Information Technology research: Developing advanced information systems to address critical areas of need for government agencies and citizens in data management and online transactions;
• Digital Government community building: Helping to organize the annual 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; and coordinating the activities of other major areas of DG research;
• Digital Government program growth: Organizing and participating in workshops to help develop new directions for NSF’s Digital Government program.

Research Focus

DGRC research focuses on dealing with large, possibly distributed, sets of numerical and textual data, collected by government agencies at all levels. Processing, inspecting, and integrating information across different sources can be extremely difficult.

DGRC has been investigating several foundational questions in information processing for government use. One is single-point integrated access to large, dispersed collections of government data. Another is in-depth sophisticated analysis of texts and comments sent by the public to the government. A third is semi-automatic assistance to government staff to create and extend their metadata, taxonomies, and glossaries.

Current major undertakings are:

• 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 Los Angeles region.

• The eRule project, a partnership with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, and San Francisco University, is working with the Federal EPA and Department of Transportation to analyze automatically text comments by the public about proposed regulations. This includes near-duplicate removal, opinion identification, stakeholder identification, and more.



• The SifT/Guspin project is using machine-learning techniques to automatically map and integrate air quality data collected by various environmental protection agencies in California and elsewhere.
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• The OntoGrow project is working with the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense to develop techniques to extract and formalize pertinent aspects of textual descriptions of data, in order to automate linking of text documents and data collections across agencies and countries.
  
  
• The QUALEG project facilitates electronic interactions between citizens and city government. Partners in this project include the Technion in Israel and the city of Saarbrücken in Germany in the context of a larger project, funded by the European Commission’s eGovernment unit.
  
  

Education, Community Building and Outreach

In addition to its research activities, DGRC is involved in important educational and outreach efforts related to digital government, including:

• DigitalGovernment.org, an online resource for the digital government research community and other interested parties. Among other things, it houses a searchable index of NSF Digital Government related awards.
  www.digitalgovernment.org
  
• The annual International Conference on Digital Government Research
  www.dgrc.org/dgo2006/
  
• DG Online, the monthly newsletter of Digital Government Research
  www.digitalgovernment.org/news/stories/dgonline_latest.jsp
  
• International outreach and collaboration. DGRC has played a central role in establishing contacts and collaborations among international researchers in digital government/e-government. DGRC has helped organize several workshops and other meetings for this purpose.

Contacts
Director:                                                            Yigal Arens (arens@isi.edu)
Director for Research:                                    Eduard Hovy (hovy@isi.edu)
Assistant Director for Development:            Valerie Gregg (vgregg@isi.edu)
Co-Director:                                                     David Waltz (waltz@cs.columbia.edu)
Publicity Officer:                                              Chrystol Koempel (koempel@isi.edu)

Digital Government Research Center
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
USA

http://dgrc.org