Database Middleware for Distributed Ontologies
in State and Federal Family & Social Services

Virginia Tech & Purdue University

Mirror at Purdue University

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What’s New?

Article about WebDG in the Digital Government Newsletter (November 2002).
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A step-by-step WebDG Tour is now available to learn about the main features of WebDG prototype.
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The second version of WebDG prototype is now available.
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The E-Commerce & E-Government Research Lab at Virginia Tech.
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The National Conference for Digital Government Research (dg.o 2002).
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About the Project

This NSF-sponsored project is funded from a coordinated proposal from Virginia Tech (E-Commerce & E-Government Research Lab) and Purdue University (Indiana Center for Database Systems). The project researchers will team up with state and federal agencies namely, the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). For more details about the project, a presentation can be downloaded here.

WebDG Prototype and Tour

The second version of WebDG (Web Digital Government) prototype presented at the National Conference for Digital Government Research (dg.o2002) is available online. You can also visit our step-by-step WebDG Tour to learn about the main features of WebDG prototype.

Research Challenges

The aim of the project is to enable the citizens of Indiana and FSSA social workers get timely information and services from local, state, and federal governments. The disadvantaged citizens would have most of their needs satisfied in one single meeting. Social workers would be able to access all necessary information using one single interface: the Web.

Collecting benefits using current FSSA systems is a time-consuming, frustrating, and complex process for needy citizens and social workers. As depicted in the figure above, the current system requires citizens to visit several offices in and outside the towns in which they reside to receive the benefits they are entitled to. In many cases, dealing with this process prevents the underprivileged citizens from devoting adequate time to enhancing their prospects for becoming self-supporting with a consequential harmful impact on their health and safety. In this project, we investigate the design and implementation of a middleware for organizing, accessing, and managing government welfare databases and services. In particular, we aim at addressing the following issues:

· Government Databases: FSSA agencies typically consist of dozens of autonomous departments providing services to the needy and indigent citizens. They use a plethora of databases to manage and provide services and resources under their jurisdiction. One of the major problems facing these agencies is the use of isolated, heterogeneous and autonomous information systems that are hard to interoperate. The quality and cost-effectiveness of government services could tremendously be improved if techniques are available to access government databases in a seamless fashion.

· Government Services: Several rehabilitation programs are provided within FSSA to help disadvantaged citizens. Currently FSSA social workers must deal with different situations that depend on the particular needs of each citizen (disability, pregnancy, children health, etc). For each situation, they must typically delve into a large number of applications and determine those that best meet citizens’ needs. To facilitate the use of FSSA application, we investigate the development of techniques to efficiently organize and discover FSSA applications. We also investigate means for the declarative composition of services to build value added services.

Questions or Comments? Please send email to brahim@vt.edu