Digital Government Portal: A Tool for Digital Government Research

Introduction DGPort is an intelligent Web portal for digital government researchers developed in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the University of Arizona. We will highlight the project accomplishments and goals in this paper. While the Web has provided a convenient means for sharing research ideas, digital government researchers often find themselves facing the problem of information overload (Blair et al., 1985), in which a search on a general-purpose search engine such as Google results in thousands of hits. In addition, the diversity of research perspectives and applications areas has resulted in terminology and vocabulary differences. Researchers in different disciplines use different terminologies to describe their findings, and user search terms may be different from the indexing terminologies used in databases. Information sources and quality on the web are equally diverse (Lawrence & Giles, 1999), forcing researchers to go to multiple information sources (Web sites, search engines, online academic databases, etc.) and conduct significant manual analysis to identify quality, time-critical information. The lack of an integrated, “onestop shopping” service is an urgent problem to be resolved.