Grant Number: 205111 Description: Continuing grant Associated Project: Award Date: Award Period: 2002-10-01 to 2007-09-30 Amount: $ 2277821.00 Primary Investigator: Eduard Hovy Researchers Eduard Hovy Technology: Modeling & Simulation Metadata Knowledge Systems Information Architecture & Management HCI-Usability Geographic Information Systems Digital Libraries & Archives Data Visualization Data Sharing & Integration Government Domain: Statistics & Surveying Records & Archives Public Management/Administration

Primary Institution:
U of Southern California

Project Home Page:
None

Abstract:
This grant will explore the automated construction of domain ontologies across governmental datasets. There are many "data silos" in government; that is, collections of data which cannot be cross-compared or queried. This is a major problem in presenting government information to consumers which is tailored according to their interests, rather than according to the organizational structure of government agencies. While such automated tools cannot completely construct accurate ontologies, they can take much of the labor intensiveness out of such efforts, particularly where the number of terms or variables is so large (in the thousands) as to prevent manual efforts. Working with the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has many datasets of interest to the public, the research team will develop a semi-automated toolkit to aid in the construction of ontologies.