Scalable data collection and retrieval infrastructure for digital government applications

In this paper we describe highlights of the project titled "Scalable data collection infrastructure for digital government applications" under the auspices of the Digital Government Research Program of the National Science Foundation. Our research is focused on taking advantage of the distributed nature of data and the interaction with it. Our efforts have been directed at both the systems/theoretical and applications levels. On the systems and theoretical levels, we have continued our development of the BISTRO system (Section 2). On the applications level, work has commenced on the development of a mechanism for spatially tagging text documents for retrieval by search engines based on both content and spatial proximity (Section 3).