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GCN Home > 07/17/06 issue

e-Gov meets Web 2.0

Not content to lag online trends, agencies adopt latest Web apps

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Each year, thousands of people contact the Veterans Affairs Department asking where long-lost relatives and others who served in the military are buried. VA has always had the information on hand—in some form—across various sets of internal electronic records. Historically, people would call or write the agency, and diligent employees would find the location and return the answers.

In 2004, though, VA debuted a Web site called the Gravesite Locator, which included a simple search program that people could use themselves to discover where fallen soldiers rested. The site brought together data from multiple sources and presented it to the public as one seamless user interface. And it moved beyond first-generation e-government initiatives to exploit the latest Web application technology.

During the mid-1990s, VA’s National Cemetery Administration created the Burial Operation Support System to keep track of service members in the agency’s national cemeteries. Later, a read-only database was built to collect information from this and other sources, which the Locator, in turn, can tap.

“It was natural progression of what we had to do internally,” said Joe Nosari, deputy CIO for Memorial Affairs, whose office built the database.

Today, most agencies have well-developed Web sites that offer a wide range of materials—much of it static information such as documents. A few progressive organizations however, such as VA’s Memorial Affairs, have taken a step beyond early e-gov programs, using the Web as a platform for delivering interactive services, aka Web 2.0. These new services, or Web applications, make better use of an agency’s data and other resources, including human resources, by creating bridges from public-facing Web sites to back-end databases. And increasingly, thanks to a slew of new open-source and commercially available tools, government Web applications can be as rich as software run on a PC.

We’ve come a long way since the mid-1990s, when agencies posted their first Web sites. Back then, if you wanted Web surfers to tap into a database, you used the Common Gateway Interface and a programming/scripting language of choice. Web server software would recognize a CGI request and look in a directory for the executable file that would handle such advanced tasks as actually accessing the database.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, E-Government, Management, Web Strategies



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