Digital Gov. Research, e-Gov Solutions
dg.o2004 Demo Sessions Show Off Street-Level Systems Research
By Karen Heyman
For the DGRC

Live Demos
	Georgia Tech's Richard Fujimoto shows off a system of traffic telemetry mapping using a wireless car-to-car network.

As shown by the demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday night at this year's Digital Government conference, DG research is not only interdisciplinary, it is pragmatic. Computer scientists, social scientists, environmental scientists have joined over the six year existence of the program to create projects that range from citizen participation in democratic institutions to children's understanding of statistics to, well, in at least one case, teach us all something we never would have imagined about the state of Nebraska.

It turns out, if Digital Government researcher William Waltman is to be believed, that the next great wine growing region of the United States may well be Nebraska. Listen to Waltman, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who is studying tools for predicting droughts, and it does begin to make a great deal of sense:

Virus Trackers
	University of Arizona's Daniel Zeng explains the WNV-BOT system's ability to track the spread of West Nile Virus.

Surprisingly, Nebraska has both the soil, and in certain areas, the climate to support wine grapes. He's able to pinpoint exactly what areas using The National Agricultural Decision Support System, a Web-based data integration tool his group originally developed to detect areas of drought.

The wine mapping was a side project that may ultimately have a positive economic impact for the state - wine regions mean profits for farmers and a likely tourism boom, as restaurants and B'n'B's are created near the vineyards. Looking at his poster, the NSF Program Chair Valerie Gregg commented, "It's very, very innovative and exciting."

Innovative ways of seeing problems and data are a Digital Government hallmark. Judith Cushing of Evergreen College and her team are transforming text-based data on forestry problems into graphical representations. Suddenly, a string of numbers on a spreadsheet is transformed into an at-a-glance overview of a problem.

But they aren't mere charts where numbers become barely more comprehensible colored bars - they are actual pictures, which depict forests and trees in stylized form. Her work will help forest managers quickly explain how healthy or endangered a forest may be. It is one thing to tell the press or public officials that, "40% of our trees have a blight," and quite another, more powerful thing when you see the inventoried trees in shades of healthy green and danger-zone red.

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The simple power of good graphics is demonstrated in another, quite different project. Shirley Becker of the University of Arizona and her team helped create a remote diagnostic device that can be used by patients living in Southwestern tribal communities. The handheld instrument communicates in English, Navajo and Spanish. Their work on interface design allowed them to create a version of the standard chart used to diagnose foot wounds that can be read and understood easily by non-medical personnel on the small screen of a PDA. The work will help improve the health, and even cut down on amputations, for those suffering from severe diabetes.

Another hallmark of Digital Government has been data integration. Many projects feature the intermingling of various databases to create a comprehensive information set. Peter McCartney of the University of Arizona has a project that integrates entire modeling systems to create an ecological scenario for urban areas. His software takes output of one system and uses it as the input into the next answer to answer questions like what happens the local climate as a result of development.

Of course, at a conference, it's not just data that mingles. The best exchanges in the demo room all began with the words, "I know someone who really should see your work."