dgOnline NEWS > DG Researchers Re-Tool a Venerable... -
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Published on: 10/20/2003
Last Visited: 6/21/2006
- Marshall DeBerry
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The challenges of handling large amounts of data continue to drive innovation at the U.S. Census Bureau and other statistical agencies, according to Marshall DeBerry, Program Manager of the FedStats site.Now, Fedstats is seeking help from a DG research project - "A Language-Modeling Approach To Metadata for Cross-Database Linkage and Search" - which is exploring data mining techniques as a way of consolidating and distilling search results for better-focused searches.
"The statistical agencies have always been in the forefront of information technologies.We've always confronted the issue of how to get data in and out quickly, and have had to be innovative in ways of addressing that problem," DeBerry explains.
One of the most impressive of the contemporary uses of information technology, FedStats is the federal government's one-stop shop for every imaginable kind of government statistic."In the late 90's, in a lot of ways the government was way ahead in putting out information," says DeBerry, "FedStats was one of the first portals."
But being at the forefront in IT has well-known drawbacks, DeBerry acknowledges: "Anything you do with IT eventually becomes a legacy environment.
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Seeking a better way to ensure that searches could be weighted to return the most relevant results first, DeBerry enlisted the help of Digital Government researcher Jamie Callan, associate professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Currently, Callan and DeBerry are using a working prototype to test the softwareÕs application to FedStats.
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