United States Government Printing Office (GPO) Case Study

Search Technologies is a key contractor, responsible for search and related technologies, to the US Government Printing Office (GPO) on the FDSys project.  The GPO's Federal Digital System (FDSys) enables easy public access to government information provided by Congress and other Federal agencies.  Microsoft FAST ESP underpins the FDSys project.

A growing library of information is being made more easily available to the public under FDSys.  This includes the migration of more than twenty data collections from the legacy GPO Access system including Congressional Reports, Daily Congressional Records, Economic Indicators, Reports to the President and the Budget of the United States Government.

As a matter of principle, all of these data sources are being converted to xml as a part of the migration process.  During this conversion, Search Technologies' Document Processing Methodology for Search is being used to add further structure to the data.  This significantly enhances the search experience over what is a large and growing data set.  Document processing includes the extraction of Organizations, Persons, Locations and Keywords, providing the raw material for a series of search navigators, as this example search for freedom of speech illustrates.

One of the collections that has been migrated to FDSys is the Federal Register.  This is published daily by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and it contains a detailed description of the Executive branch of Government's daily policy decisions, such as federal regulation changes.  The Federal Register runs to about 80,000 pages per year.

Search Technologies designed the architecture for "Federal Register 2.0", as it is being called, and provided implementation services working with the GPO.  The project comprised the transformation of this large data set into xml and the automated creation of much additional meta data.  The resulting search experience enables easy public access to the Federal Register and in so doing, supports a major goal of the Obama administration.

To quote Ray Mosley, Director of the Federal Register, "This paves the way for consumers, rather than Government officials to be in charge of deciding how to access critical information.  The  GPO and the Office of the Federal Register accomplished a minor miracle in warp-speed time"

Praise indeed.  Search Technologies staff, including our Chief Architect Paul Nelson, continue to be engaged with the GPO working on the transformation of additional data sets and the building out of FAST ESP-based search access. 

Paul's blog article Search and Very Large Publishers gives further insight into the planning and execution of this project.