Federal IT Group on LinkedIn

I must say I was somewhat surprised by not being able to find a LinkedIn group for professionals in the federal government IT sector. (Perhaps, this has to do with the fact that LinkedIn has not yet implemented a searchable groups directory.)

So... I went ahead and created one. The Federal IT Group is now active, and you are invited to join (by clicking here).

Hopefully, this will take off...

Also, if you know of any LinkedIn group in this or similar area, I would greatly appreciate if you could let me know.

Toughening on FOIA request processing

Going through one of last month's issues of BusinessWeek, I noticed a brief mentioning of a particularly important piece of legislation signed by the President late last year - an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):

Businesses, which account for roughly 60% of FOIA requests, complain that their inquiries are routinely stalled by foot-dragging bureaucrats. But a little-noticed amendment to the FOIA law, adopted late last year, tightens response deadlines and makes it easier for applicants to recover attorneys’ fees if an agency unsuccessfully challenges their requests in court.

The full text of this bill can be found here (the Government Printing Office website).

Will this legislation have any impact on projects similar to Air Force FACTS? As FCW reported back in March 2007,

Air Force FACTS will be a Web-based system, hosted on the Air Force portal, where employees of the service can log on to check the status of requests being processed.

Removing Barriers to Information Sharing

It's good to be back ...

Could not pass by a wonderfully written piece in the latest edition of Federal Computer Week: Alan Joch addresses several key challenges to effective information sharing in the intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security areas, as well as solutions to dealing with them.

A couple of noteworthy quotes:

Challenge: Inadequate vetting and feedback
Local law enforcement incident reports, quickly becoming the first line of defense against criminal activity, could distribute inaccuracies throughout data-sharing networks or, conversely, represent missed opportunities.

For example, a police officer might question a driver who has stopped his vehicle outside a nuclear facility, ostensibly to check a mechanical problem with his car. Even though no formal police action might be warranted, the officer describes the encounter and enters the driver’s name and license number in a field report. The incident could prove to be insignificant, or it might help reveal a pattern of suspicious activity if officers in other areas match it to similar activities at nearby power plants.

The above presents itself as a niche for the pattern recognition projects mentioned in my earlier posts.

Challenge: Protecting privacy
...
Questions can arise when agencies acquire aggregated information from commercial data brokers...

New distributed data management architectures might be better suited to the task of reducing privacy risks than older data-sharing approaches that rely on centralized data warehouses run by the government and fed by federal, local and state users.

Pattern recognition projects

There was another indication of a growing federal government interest in technologies for recognizing terror threat-related patterns and relationships in open information sources (such as newspapers, magazines, journals, and public records).

Earlier this month, this blog featured a post on a newly released Intelligence Analysis solutions package from LexisNexis. One of its components ("Open Source Analysis") was designed to help understand national security threats by identifying operational signatures within disparate, multi-sourced data sets.

Last month, the Homeland Security Department awarded a $3 million grant to a consortium of industry and academic research labs led by Rutgers University's Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). As stated in the press release,

"This group will develop computing technologies that find patterns and relationships in data, such as news stories, open-source web logs, and other accessible information, to quickly identify emerging indicators of possible terrorist activity, and rate the consistency and reliability of the sources. Such information could give officials more lead time to investigate and potentially thwart terrorist plans."

Dr. Fred C. Roberts, director of the DIMACS, noted that two key challenges involved in this project are
(1)The massive amount of information to be processed, and
(2)The speed at which both this information and its sources change.

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Technology, Information Management, Enterprise Search, Search Engines

NEWS: New government portal

Convera Corporation (a Vienna, VA-based provider of search technologies) has announced a release of a free government search portal named "Govmine". The tool (currently in a beta-version) became a third player in the government portal market following FirstGov (powered by Microsoft's MSN Search and Vivisimo's Clusty) and Google's U.S. Government Search. It is designed to serve the needs of government knowledge workers (unlike FirstGov, for example, which caters to citizens).

Govmine uses Convera's platform already installed in many federal agencies. As FCW notes, Govmine's results are based on pattern recognition and semantic technology (in contrast to Google's ranking system, which analyses links among Web sites to determine an individual page's value).

FCW also points out (quoting Kurt Gastrock, Convera's chief operating officer) that Convera has experience with efficiently categorizing search results for government professionals. For example, an employee searching for "serotonin" would see the results categorized in the following order:

-- Diseases and pathological conditions (25,547 results)
-- Treatment (21,618 Results)
-- Symptoms (2,612 Results)
-- Side effects (9,693 results)
-- Drug toxicity (864 results)
-- Food and drug recalls (9 results)

One question here is how this new offering will work with the agencies' existing investments in Convera products - that is, is it intended to compliment or substitute these investments in any way?

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Management, Enterprise Search, Search Engines, Information Technology

NEWS: "Single sign-on" service for Homeland Security Department

On August 7, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a Request for Information (RFI) for industry solutions that can provide single sign-on (SSO) access to its online services in order to improve the DHS strategic information-sharing capability - that is, "getting the right information to the right people without delay".

As noted in the accompanying Statement of Work (SOW) (MS Word document), one specific aspect of this project is defining "he types of information the SSO service needs in order to make appropriate decisions about which individuals should be given access to what information under which circumstances, based on applicable law, policy and operational need. In other words, what attributes do we need to know of a person requesting access to a DHS information resource?"

In particular, the following factors can potentially be used to determine attributes of a highest-priority person (according to the SOW):

-- Employing organizations, sub-entities, work roles, etc.;
-- Characteristics of the user populations currently served by the DHS information services;
-- Type and sensitivity of information provided to users;
-- "Ideal" user populations (that is, all those whose mission could be better or more easily achieved by access to the information, whether or not currently accessing the information service);
-- Legally authorized purposes of the users (that is, permitted "routine uses" declared for privacy information);
-- Other limitations on distribution of the information,(for example, "memorandum-of-understanding" restrictions linked to information obtained from other agencies); and
-- Attributes currently being used to govern access to the information resources.

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Management, Information Systems, Security, Information Security, Information Sharing

NEWS: Future Digital System contract awarded

On August 4, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) announced that Harris Corporation of Melbourne, Fla. was selected as the Master Integrator for the project to build the GPO's Future Digital System (FDSys).

As stated in one of the earlier requirements documents, the FDSys will serve "to ingest, preserve and provide access to electronic content from all three Branches of the U.S. Government". More specifically, the system should be able to support the GPO's content management and content delivery processes by

-- Providing access to descriptions of all types of content preserved by the GPO;
-- Accepting/ingesting content in a variety of complex formats;
-- Being capable to accommodate future digital formats;
-- Ensuring the authenticity of the content that the GPO preserves;
-- Providing access to the content; and
-- Supporting flexible services for content that the GPO will manage on behalf of other Federal agencies.

The Master Integrator will operate as a general contractor and will work collaboratively with the GPO to identify solutions for the FDSys functions and to integrate various components, technology, and applications.

Harris Corporation develops communications products for government and commercial customers worldwide. Among these products are microwave, satellite, and other wireless network transmission equipment, air traffic control systems, mobile radio systems, and digital network broadcasting and management systems. The company's largest customer is the U.S. Federal Government.

As part of their bidding strategy, Harris provided the GPO with several scenarios for how the latter could use commercially available technologies to accomplish its objective. Interestingly, the scenarios were based on the Harris' previous experience with building a prototype of the National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archive - a project, for which the company was subsequently "beaten out" by Lockheed Martin.

Technorati tags: United States, Federal Government, Information Management, Document Management, Information Technology